Music and progress

Listening to church music from across the ages on my hi-fi makes me realise that things progress and change in wonderful ways. Frank Martin's Mass for Double Choir represents the pioneering new sound-world being explored in the first half of the twentieth century. It is inspiring for me to think that each of the many characters in the world's musical heritage have contributed a little bit to progress from old to new. Each has found his or her own voice in the sounds that we are capable of exploring. Music is the most mysterious of our human faculties. How, and why, have we developed this sense for sound? Why does it arouse emotion in us? These are questions which intrigue me and to which I do not know the answer.

However, I do know that music does have a real effect on our lives, thoughts and feelings. The challenge for me in everything I have undertaken has been to find my own my voice, to find an original expression within a tradition. I suspect that this is true for everyone in their own way. Our nature drives us to be different and to set ourselves apart from that which surrounds us. This infinitely wide world of sound and music deserves our full respect and concentration, so that we might have a chance of appreciating what it represents. I would like to immerse myself in as much of it as possible, to find out why and what it means to the people who surround themselves with it, or perhaps more accurately, who it surrounds. It is not acceptable in our relativist world to assume an absolute position, dismissing those different from ourselves. Far from losing meaning by adopting a relativist and open-minded position, we open ourselves to the full spectrum of meaning embodied by the worlds within worlds we find on our planet.