Cygnus Ensemble

A:

Your evocation of Stravinsky in The Creation makes me think of that famous remark that Stravinsky made--something about music not being about emotion? Oliver Sacks would have hard evidence against Starvinsky, I suppose, but there is a larger question you could touch upon.  Could you speak about emotion in music?

B:
I wouldn't leave emotion out of it by any means. Part of what made Pre-R so repellent to some, I think, was the obvious sentiment; although that's clearly in the eye of the beholder, ultimately. There's no mistaking the particularity of the mood in nearly all Pre-R stuff, anyway.

In any case some of the early 20C modernists had a bellyful of emotive expression and were craving relief. OTOH you had Schoenberg and the Expressionists, but they dove down their own escape hatch. Still, the "escape from emotion" in Strav and Eliot is understandable.

Where it connects to my point of view, such as it is, is in the domain of "what makes it interesting?" Not *my* emotions, certainly. All I can lay claim to is having passed through a certain slice of culture and society for a certain delimited span of time. What's wonderful about it is how, when you train your attentiveness on the whole spectrum of culture and society, those limitations have a refractory effect on the entire picture -- it turns them colors, so to speak, and gives them depth and meaning.

That's why there's no reason *not* to look back at myth, or history, or an idealized snapshot of some fictional scene. The sentiment is there, unmistakably, but what it has thereby is *meaning*, a sense of significance, of a place in the world and the whole order of things. I am only one piece of that, the lens and film that happens to make it possible on this one random occasion.