“The Realm of Music,” by Ferruccio Busoni (1910)

Come, follow me into the realm of music.  Here is the iron fence which separates the earthly from the eternal.  Have you undone the fetters and thrown them away?  Now come.  It is not as it was before when we stepped into a strange country; we soon learnt to know everything there and nothing surprised us any longer.  Here there is no end to the astonishment, and yet from the beginning we feel it is homelike.

You still hear nothing, because everything sounds.  Now already you begin to differentiate.  Listen, every star has its rhythm and every world its measure.  And on each of the stars and each of the worlds, the heart of every separate living being is beating in its own individual way.  All all the beats agree and are separate and yet are a whole.

Your inner ear is sharper.  Do you hear the depths and the heights?  They are as immeasurable as space and endless as numbers.

Unthought-of scales extend like bands from one world to another, stationary and yet eternally in motion.  Every tone is the center of immeasurable circles.  And now sound is revealed to you!

Innumerable are its voices; compared with them the murmuring of a harp is a din; the blare of a thousand trombones a chirrup.  All, all melodies heard before or never heard, resound completely and simultaneously, carry you, hang over you, or skim lightly past you— of love and passion, of spring and of winter, of melancholy and of hilarity, they are themselves the souls of millions of beings in millions of epochs.  If you focus your attention on one of them you perceive how it is connected with all the others, how it is combined with all the rhythms, colored by all kinds of sounds, accompanied by all harmonies, down to the unfathomable depths and up to the vaulted roof of heaven.

Now you realize how planets and hearts are one, that nowhere can there be an end or an obstacle, that infinity lives in the spirit of all beings; that each being is illimitably great and illimitably small: the greatest expansion is like a point; and that light, sound, movement and power are identical, and each separate and all united, they are life.

December 23, 2009, 2:48pm