This is Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Major.
I was
listening to its closing notes today on my phone as I was running through
Kenwood and it caught me by the throat. I played it over and over. I tried not
to sing along loudly as I ran among the orange leaves on the muddy path.
But as much as those notes have that power to make me look
like a crazy lady in a London park, I know that they are not universal truth;
they only emerge from universal truth, as an expressed version of that
singularity. The only absolute version
of that singularity is silence.
The rest is interpretation, which is just as well really because the silence from which the music emerges is not directly communicable.
Words are not the thing.
The notes are not the thing. The skills of the violinist are not the
thing. My iPhone is not the thing. The gaps between
the notes are not the thing because even silence itself is really only an
experience of humans who aren't experiencing sound in the moment. Everything we experience in life is
an interpretation of the thing.
Here’s what I believe deep down, that music is beautiful because
we are alive to hear it. And that if I
feel like it, I should sing along loudly, without worrying too much about looking like a
crazy lady.
