O Angelic Art!

Some thirty or forty years ago, having much reflected upon, and closely listened to, music [There was, at about the same time, a sweet, comely and not unintelligent young man who, having observed me listening to music on the radio, said to me wonderingly, "Nobody listens to music with such rapt attention as you do!"] I said (to myself, and later repeated in conversation with friends), definitively, "Music is the progressive revelation, or the logical demonstration, of the occult (or not immediately apparent) relationships, or relative resonance, among musical tones."  I was thinking primarily of the Well Tempered Clavier when I said that, but, when I thought about it, it seemed equally well to apply to the puzzling enharmonics of Chopin mazurkas, to the voluptuous/ethereal love/death of Tristan und Isolde, to the haunting "dissonance" of K. 465, and to the Depiction of Chaos as imagined by Haydn at the beginning of The Creation--as well as to all the less problematic, more simply beautiful, but no less profound, music written before and since those peculiarly enigmatic masterpieces.  Impossible as it is for the amusic--and for those haplessly deafened and desensitized by the Molochean trumps and timbrels into which our neo-Carthaginean imperium has, with hideous clangor (as though to drown out the shrieks of immolated children) popularly devolved--to imagine, for those (few though they be) with ears to hear, there is an element of surprise, always renewed and always gratified, in even the simplest of great music; of something proposed, and of something neatly (or wittily, or interestingly) resolved.  And it's something you're aware of and can talk to other people, with similar awareness, about--or you're not aware of it, and you cannot be argued or reasoned or shamed into an awareness of it.  A good example in the modern world is Haydn quartets:  If you find them boring, you're in numerous company.  So do most people.  And God, how you all bore me!  As well, of course, as appall, disgust and infuriate me.