An Attempted Exposition of Music
The jargon of the tick-tack man,
the lingua franca of the deaf and dumb,
the musician, the brailleist, the kapellmeister,
their factors, these their hands and fingers,
with contrasts precisely touched upon,
raise up in thin air semaphores to eye,
and inward eye and ear;
the meanings of words,
of dots, of depressed keys.
Is absolute pitch a hardwired gift from God?
What heterodyned comparison
of tuned oscillations between the brain and ear
holds without drifting at four-forty Hertz
in such a neurotic house;
and to the gifted discernible
so far removed from caesium’s blue heaven?
Music is made up, composed of notes;
as in the Banks of Erewhon,
in an unbacked currency, non-negotiable,
unless by mutual sentiment approved.
The wings of the literary Icarus
nonplussed by its material emptiness.
So, what if anything, does music represent?
A conductor’s baton is an instrument,
to point in well defined anticipation,
at what ought next to be going on
in neural repositories.
A glance exchanged confirms her entry
She has it at her finger tips,
in individual touch upon the keys.
That affecting, opening legato phrase,
a barrage of quantum level energies
scattered along the staves;
impulses that cross the threshold of her mind,
triggering percussive impacts on the wires,
impulses dispersed across the thresholds of our ears,
a transmission of pure form made audible.
Page(s) 22-23
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