Friday, September 03, 2010

More Theory Thoughts

One thing I learned from Dr. Falby, and a point that I should always stress with my students, is that music is multi-layered and full of meaningful intricacies. To put this in more poetic terms, great music of genius is, as he said once in Lasker, "saturated with glory."

This saturation with glory makes analysis (that is, pursuing consciousness of all that is happening in the music) complicated. But exploring the layers and intricacies can also be a worshipful activity as we are exercising our abilities to think, to discern, to imagine, and to celebrate wonders.

In this way, our creative work mirrors God's way of creating since the universe of which we are a part is, itself, multi-layered and full of fantastic intricacies.

I am reminded as I write that not only can music be incredibly rich in its internal organization, it also intersects with our lives and other disciplines in an amazingly diverse number of ways from dance, to math, to biology, to history, and religion to the deeply personal and spiritual . . .

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