3.
The Magic of Music
In real life ambiguity may be described as a doubtful quality, somebody who is
ambiguous, not knowing exactly what he or she wants, how to react etc. But in
the world of sound, in this magical world of sound, ambiguity means that there
are many many possibilities, many ways to go. And the longer you hold back on
the resolution, the more interesting the whole thing becomes. ...
The world that we live in, if you want, makes it ethically more and more
difficult to make music, because it is a world which gives us answers, even when
there is no question. My point is that music, classical music as we know it,
European classical music that we have today, will not survive unless we make a
radical effort to change our attitude to it and unless we take it away from a
specialised niche that it has become, unrelated to the rest of the world, and
make it something that is essential to our lives. Not something ornamental, not
only something enjoyable, not only something exciting, but something essential.
Some of us are more fanatic about music, more interested than others, but I
think we should all have the possibility to learn not only it but to learn from
it. It is perfectly acceptable throughout the world that you have to have
acquired a lot of life experience in order to then bring it out in your music
making, but there's so many things that you can learn from the music towards
understanding the world, if you think of music as something essential. ...
One of the questions that preoccupies many intellectuals today is why is the
music of the past of such relevance to us today? And what about the music of
today? And it's evident that the music of today could not have been created, and
therefore cannot exist, without the music of the past. And there is a necessity
to be able to play the music of today with a feeling of familiarity that seems
to us perfectly natural when we play the music of the past, as it is necessary
for us to have a sense of discovery from the music of the past as if it is being
written today. ...
It is my duty, when I play something new, something that is not familiar, to
play it with understanding it as if it had been here for many many years and for
many many centuries in the same that it is necessary for me to find a sense of
discovery in the music of the past. And this is of course - and this brings me
to the end of this lecture - this is of course the most important point. Of all
the different things that I believe we can learn from music, and each and every
one of us obviously learns different things, the most clearly definable is the
fact that music teaches us as human beings that everything, without an
exception, has a past, a present, and a future. Very simple to say, but we all
know how difficult it is to live. When we have a pleasant present, we want it to
last, we think it will last forever, but in fact the fluidity of life is for me
best expressed in music. Coming out of nothing, the past, the present of the
first note, which is nothing but a transition. And what I have learned from
music, and have of course not been able to apply to my daily life, is accepting
the fluidity of life and the fact that nothing, absolutely nothing, is
completely independent and solid, but everything that I think and feel is
dependent on this fluidity of life. Thank you very much.
From discussions with the audience
Technology has advanced so much, and that we have... we and our ancestors have
not done enough to make sure that the thinking capacity develops at the same
speed, and is very much easier in technology or in sports to define progress.
Somebody who runs a hundred metres today quicker than last year is obviously a
better runner, but is Boulez a better composer than Mozart? I don't think so, I
just think he himself would... he has learned a lot and he writes in a
completely different style, but there is not the easy definition of what is
better. Are we better human beings now than there were three or five hundred
years ago? In some aspects yes. We don't have slavery, we accept so many things
now that we were not able to accept even fifty years ago. But in our own
individual private self we are still subject to the same pressures that our
ancestors were five or ten thousand years ago. ...
Wagner and Liszt were also avant garde musicians, but the avant garde of today
is fighting two losing battles. First of all, that some of it has no contact
with the past, which was never the case at all, but more important, it is
fighting a losing battle in the sense that music is not part of society. And
therefore anything that is not immediately accessible is very difficult to make
part of our society. I think that a new work, the work of avant garde, has to
have the possibility to put itself in the same programme with a symphony by
Beethoven or whoever it may be, and, and then you see whether it stands on the
same, if you wanted, the same league or not. I don't believe in making a niche,
a separate niche for anything at all. ...
People resist a lot of things. People resist every... a lot of music that
requires er listening with thought. It's not only contemporary music. ... The
point is that there is no music education to speak of, and when there is, it is
only as a specialised profession. And music was never a profession, music was
always a way of life. I am sure Mozart and Wagner and Strauss and all the
composers, as well as Pierre Boulez and Michel Guilan, who is sitting here, and
all the great musicians, don't consider themselves that as a profession. They do
that in a professional way, but this is not a profession, it's a way of life,
and therefore you cannot make a niche for that. ...
I think, I think that everything is made human by the way we do it and the way
we look at it. Of course music does not have to have those qualities, of course
music is subversive. I'm sorry, but when I conduct a Mozart opera and I, and the
first violins play the, the, main melody, and the second violins and the viola,
they are already providing the subversive element. What music teaches us is not
that it is all beautiful or that it is all subversive, or that you can use it or
that you can abuse it. What music teaches us is that all of those things can be
made one. And this is what music does, and in that way it is not unlike
religion. Not in an institutionalised way of religion, in the physic... or of
the coming one - this is what music is about for me. ...
On the Nature and Power of
Music: Next Page
Reference address of this text:
