{"id":3086,"date":"2023-06-27T15:40:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-27T19:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/john-berger-on-the-power-of-music-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2023-06-27T15:40:00","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T19:40:00","slug":"john-berger-on-the-power-of-music-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/john-berger-on-the-power-of-music-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"John Berger on the Power of Music \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u201cA rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music,\u201d the poet Mark Strand wrote in his ode to the enchantment of music<\/a>. Music is the most indescribable of the arts, and that may be what makes it the most powerful \u2014 the creative force best capable of giving voice and shape to our most ineffable experiences and most layered longings, of containing them and expanding them at once. It is our supreme language for the exhilaration of being alive<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I have come upon no finer definition of music than philosopher Susanne Langer\u2019s, who conceived of it as a laboratory for feeling in time<\/a>. Time, indeed, is not only the raw material of music \u2014 the fundamental building block of melody and rhythm \u2014 but also its supreme gift to the listener. A song is a shelter in time, a shelter in being \u2014 music meets us at particular moments of our lives, enters us and magnifies those moments, anchors them in the stream of life, so that each time we hear the song again the living self is transported to the lived moment, and yet transformed. <\/p>\n

That is what the uncommonly insightful painter, poet, and writer John Berger<\/strong> (November 5, 1926\u2013January 2, 2017) explores in his essay \u201cSome Notes on Song,\u201d composed in the last months of his life and included in his altogether wonderful final collection Confabulations<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

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