Music, Oh The Music

Is MUSIC a window or a door? Consider both choices carefully because metaphor has never been more perilous than at this moment. Do not answer brusquely, do not prevaricate. Neither extreme helps us. Let your mind become many minds: Let each one do what it does best to resolve this issue in multiple harmonies. If music is a window... you can step back, in fact you must. You have yourself made music, both creating it and listening to it, a sacred activity, one that partakes of the Eternal. You imagined that reality, you have lived according to it. So be it. Step back: the window is an abyss. The music pours forth from it, and envelops you in its sound, its beauty, its glory. So, we say music is a window. What follows from that metaphor? Notice the window is always open, there is neither glass nor screen. No curtain hangs there to be pulled across its openness. Consider that openness an essential aspect of music. It flows everywhere and in every time. Nothing in nature or artifice can stop or stall its constant flow. And when you sleep in darkness, if your heart is open, music will blend with your dreams and make night radiant. Over a very long stretch of time, not measured according to earthly standards, music will enter your Self. You can walk freely ever you choose. Music will abide within you, because it is a faithful thing and loves your fidelity. Yes, music is a sentient thing, a spiritual being. It has never been just noise to you, not even colored noise, certainly not the racket of the world which promises what only music can deliver: Harmony, Melody, Rhythm, Grace Notes, Variations. Sit down in a chair, the most comfortable one. There's time to fix coffee if you're inclined to its smoky aroma and taste. Music is never impatient, it is never jealous or mean. I will tell you a great secret: Music is the moral image of what you must become. You have given to music the only thing it desires: that you listen in the depths of your being, wrapped in sounds pouring through the window into your being. Over time you become the music. YOU ARE ATTUNED.... * * * * What if you say, MUSIC is a door, not a window? You are accustomed to music coming to you. Across a space of silence, it pierces the air with an arrow of sound that reaches you unerringly from its source. What is that source? Do you expect a single answer? Is it possible something so vast can be summed up in a dozen words? Maybe, maybe not. But if you see music as a door, get up from your chair, because you have already embarked on your journey. Walk through that space electric with music's passage. Music moves ahead of you, and you hear what you need to hear: Mahler's DAS LIED VON DER ERDE, PARSIFAL, CARRE, Monteverdi's VESPERS OF 1610. Walking takes no effort.You are rapt by Beethoven's STRING QUARTET OPUS 131. Its pitch rays and sound clouds launch your flight. Come, it is time. The Muse calls you. The Musicians are assembled, eagerly await your presence. There is Mozart holding his copy of K.333, offering it to you. Do you see the others? No one is in a rush, they float like you in an andante of flight toward an apotheosis of music and humanity. Composers and listeners, musicians all, ascend on columns of sound toward a plateau of LIGHT. And there is Stockhausen, smiling, no, laughing. He beckons us with his right hand, his left hand raised above his head points to something we cannot yet make out. Could it be the realm of MUSIC? The Source itself, the Fullness of what we have heard in beautiful fragments, now rendered complete?