Having spent much of yesterday afternoon editing and uploading this wonderful performance of Brandenburg IV from our Cherubim Youth Music Festival I am once again awed by the musical mind that could have created such a perfect structure. The conception, scale yet intimate intricacy to me expresses the finest achievement of the religious mind's contemplation of the harmonious potential of being alive – similar to the refined abstraction of Islamic art – yet exceeding it because the nature of Bach's musical perfection is dynamic. There can never be a single exclusive interpretation – it is reborn anew in each performance, and that is the privilege we have: by (re)creating a gossamer web of sound we are not merely participants in a miracle but can actually sense the nature and quality of the mind that brought forth this masterpiece from the Great Mind in an intimate and personal way.
To say that Bach is a cosmic singularity is no understatement. I have long believed that his phenomenal intuitive calculating ability indicates that he was a savant. I cannot see any other explanation for his super-natural structural sense; for tho his music is remarkable for its intellectual coherence, its energy (innergy) and dynamic speak clearly of a subconscious or ultra-conscious origin.
And the re-creational power of Bach's music comes precisely from this, to give us mental and emotional access to at-one-ment – an ability to put us in touch with a dynamic metaphysical reality which we sense within us, but which we Westerners have intellectualised ourselves out of sharing as a unifying human experience.
As George Herbert put it:
A man that looks on glass
On it may stay his eye;
But if he pleaseth through it pass
And then the Heaven espy.
To say that Bach is a cosmic singularity is no understatement. I have long believed that his phenomenal intuitive calculating ability indicates that he was a savant. I cannot see any other explanation for his super-natural structural sense; for tho his music is remarkable for its intellectual coherence, its energy (innergy) and dynamic speak clearly of a subconscious or ultra-conscious origin.
And the re-creational power of Bach's music comes precisely from this, to give us mental and emotional access to at-one-ment – an ability to put us in touch with a dynamic metaphysical reality which we sense within us, but which we Westerners have intellectualised ourselves out of sharing as a unifying human experience.
As George Herbert put it:
A man that looks on glass
On it may stay his eye;
But if he pleaseth through it pass
And then the Heaven espy.
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