Music
Thursday, the sun threatens to illuminate which is a hint of a brighter afternoon. Wintertime in the Midwest. How can one resist absorbing the somber, gray, cold of the season? I must resist. Music is a proven tactic for sustaining creativity, the motivation for good work.
I finished an essay written by Nietzsche which treats the relationship between music and words. The writer is head and shoulders beyond me with respect to intellect. More to the point he had a deep and wide comprehension of the historical context of music, of poetry. Nietzsche was a philologist, adept at reading classical Greek, Latin and several modern languages, Hebrew and French. He likely read Sanskrit as well. I feel an intellectual midget by comparison.
Nietzsche has this to say about music:
Music never can become a means; one may push, screw, torture it; as tone, as roll of the drum, in its crudest and simplest stages, it still defeats poetry and abases the latter to its reflection.
–Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays, By Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 37, Trans. by Oscar Levy pub. 1909
Nietzsche believed that music stands apart from the utility represented by the array of tools, material and conceptual which constitute the day to day routine of our lives. Music stands as self-justifying, complete, igniting the spirit directly, immediately. The human voice, the lyric, at best is yet one of the instruments. When voice is used as symbolic overlay of story, – that’s a distraction, a diversion from the enrapturement of melody and harmony.
At least that is what I think that Nietzsche means by what he wrote.
This tune will carry us through. Ride the wave! Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World.
