Music

'What (will happen) if we forget all the words (in a language)?'
'Perhaps we could talk another language?'
'And what if we forget all the words in all the languages?'
'We could use sign language?'
'No I mean ANY language with sounds or without sounds.'
'Don't know. We could stop talking for a while till we figure something out.'
'No, silly goose. You forgot about music.'

This is the most recent conversation with my very own Alice. She is the one asking the question. She never read Claude Levi-Strauss, my little Alice. The father of modern anthropology died at the age of 100 just a couple of months ago. I am in debt to him as he helped shape my own mature relationship to music.

Mastering music does not mean understanding music. Understanding music is impossible from within. I only learned that after having left it.

“Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.” Claude Levi-Strauss