Status Updates From Music in the Castle of Heav...

The moment that fascination with exploring the emotional reactions of the participants was allowed to dominate, the search for purely musical ways to convey the action was lost. A notable strength of Monteverdi and Cavalli (but one not shared by many of the next generation of composers) was to allow this affective reaction to fuse with and become the action,

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head.

Suppose instead we start to view him ( Bach) as an unlikely rebel: ‘someone who undermined widely acclaimed principles and closely guarded assumptions [about music]’.