Metaphysical hearing

‘My piano stands in the library. When I practise on it, I often yield to the temptation to glance at a book lurking on a shelf, which usually draws me away from playing and forces me first to read and then immediately afterwards to write. Thinking in music – which is, after all, a non-verbal activity – is hard to conceptualise and far removed from describing things in words. Yet quite often an extended period of wordless thinking, of a kind familiar to the practising musician (and to many a music lover), allows us to succumb to the illusion that we can, precisely through this wordless thinking, grasp some important aspect of human experience in its entirety. We then discover that everything is connected. Music is underpinned by mathematical structures, and at the same time it somehow enables sudden brief flashes of insight into the meaning of our lives.’

 Anna Chęćka