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| Music by Maria Popova. (Available from her as a print and as stationery cards.) |
Music, like life, is no more than itself. There is no implicit reason to it except that it is. And that is its magic.
Those words are from Tina Davidson, an accomplished pianist and leading composer, "the eldest of five children living in an itinerant family across Turkey, Germany, and Israel". Cultural commentator Maria Popova distils Davidson's autobiography titled, Let Your Heart Be Broken: Life and Music from a Classical Composer, in these words:
Eventually, that dark inner child found light in music as she became an accomplished classical composer, creating with “that wonderful absorbing feeling of being,” with “a sigh of homecoming.”
Speaking more generally, Popova affirms...
... that creative work gives something which cannot be quantified or commodified.
Margaret Atwood speaks strongly as to the importance of the creative sphere and the gift that is its product: "... its nature has spiritual worth but no monetary value, being priceless".
Popova, too, excels with poetic insight as to the role of music in our life:
It is the sacrament we reach for when we want to feel what we feel more deeply, the daily pulsebeat that helps us move through even our most challenging days with more composure and resilience. It is the sunshine of the spirit.
“This indeed is music,” Whitman exulted. “[It] whirls me wider than Uranus flies, it wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them.”
Music, the most abstract of the arts, is the most concrete in how it unlocks us to ourselves, how it “opens a path into the realm of silence.”
Following this train of thought Popova takes us to Josef Pieper, who said, first, that music "... is by its nature so close to the fundamentals of human existence", and second, in Popova's words, that "when we listen to music [...] we perceive something greater and beyond the sum total of the specific sounds and words, something of additional intimacy and meaning, just as in poetry we 'perceive more and something other than the factual, literal meaning of its words'.”
And there is another element of our spiritual dimension — Popova is able to declare that Davidson has succeeded in offering readers...
... a lyrical reckoning with what it takes to compose a life of cohesion and beauty out of shattered bits and broken stories.
On that point, Davidson herself states:
The miracle is the persistence of the soul to find itself, to look hard into the darkness, reach back, and grasp remnants of ourselves. The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.
That persistent "I" is what makes each person's life such a miracle!
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