cruel beauty
I just alighted upon this quotation of Benjamin Britten, and I love it:
"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and of freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony."
Music may torture us, but the "suffering" it inflicts is the best kind—one that compels us to confront our fears and desires, to delve deeply into and stretch beyond ourselves, to face the infinite.
This peerless, all-encompassing force of music is something I try to tap into every time I perform, but I don't always succeed. However, I felt especially connected during my recent performance at Ravinia. In spite of a cold and a severe lack of preparation—due to my crazy schedule and inconvenient practicing situation (i.e. no piano in my apartment), not a lack of responsibility!—everything somehow locked into place and I found myself equipped with this ineluctable ability to shape things just as I wished. It is the greatest joy to lose yourself in the music and the moment (to loosely quote Eminem) while opening your heart to the people around you. Alone on that stage and embraced by attentive listeners, I felt empowered and free, and although a performance doesn't last temporally, its echoes endure.
To return to the aforementioned quotation, I am finding a forlorn and urgent beauty in Radiohead's latest effort, In Rainbows. Standout tracks to me include "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," "All I Need," and "House of Cards." Another piece of music I'm obsessed with at the moment: Messiaen's "Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus" from the Quatour pour la fin du temps. This is beauty at its most ecstatic.
"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and of freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony."
Music may torture us, but the "suffering" it inflicts is the best kind—one that compels us to confront our fears and desires, to delve deeply into and stretch beyond ourselves, to face the infinite.
This peerless, all-encompassing force of music is something I try to tap into every time I perform, but I don't always succeed. However, I felt especially connected during my recent performance at Ravinia. In spite of a cold and a severe lack of preparation—due to my crazy schedule and inconvenient practicing situation (i.e. no piano in my apartment), not a lack of responsibility!—everything somehow locked into place and I found myself equipped with this ineluctable ability to shape things just as I wished. It is the greatest joy to lose yourself in the music and the moment (to loosely quote Eminem) while opening your heart to the people around you. Alone on that stage and embraced by attentive listeners, I felt empowered and free, and although a performance doesn't last temporally, its echoes endure.
To return to the aforementioned quotation, I am finding a forlorn and urgent beauty in Radiohead's latest effort, In Rainbows. Standout tracks to me include "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," "All I Need," and "House of Cards." Another piece of music I'm obsessed with at the moment: Messiaen's "Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus" from the Quatour pour la fin du temps. This is beauty at its most ecstatic.
Labels: concerts, quotations
posted by Elizabeth Joy Roe at
9:07 PM
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