from “imaginary concerts” by alex ross, the new yorker, aug 24, 2009
forget the madeleine: the most potent sensual jolt in the first book of marcel proust’s “in search of lost time” is felt when charles swann falls under the spell of “a little phrase” in a violin sonata by a provincial composer named vinteuil. it is a theme of five notes – “secret, murmuring, detached… airy and perfumed.” the first time swann hears it at a party, he fails to catch the composer’s name, but the melody haunts him. a year later, he encounters the sonata again and is entranced. the experience coincides with swann’s sudden love for the courtesan odette, yet the import of the music goes beyond matters of the heart: the refined parisian aesthete discovers a country within, a new way for his spirit to walk. proust writes, “after a high note sustained through two whole bars, swann sensed its approach, stealing forth from beneath that long-drawn sonority, stretched like a curtain of sound to veil the mystery of its incubation.” swann emerges a changed man, his mind absorbing “one of those invisible realities in which he had ceased to believe,” to which “he was conscious once again of the desire and almost the strength to consecrate his life.”
proust captures the imaginary dimension of musical experience – the ability of the mind to conjure inner worlds under the influence of charged sounds. when we listen deeply, we aren’t simply registering music’s ebb and flow, we are remaking music in our own image, investing minor details with private significance. we may even develop a bond with music that we don’t hear clearly, that we heard once long ago, or that we never heard at all.
writers have long celebrated music’s properties of transcendence and ambiguity. they envy its seeming ability to break free of the material world, even as it remains passionately linked to daily life. “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” walter pater wrote. schopenhauer called music “the most powerful of all the arts,” the one that directly embodies the human will.