A journey into light

As I understand it, people who are clinically depressed can get caught in there unable to move. The thing that the composer can do and the music can do is give you a ladder outwards from somewhere very extreme and painful...

...One of the most curious things is the pleasure we take in painful and unhappy music. There must be a reason for this, and part of may be that in exploring deep emotion the music gives you access to what they call 'the locus of control.' In other words, you externalize your feelings such that you can observe them and make changes in them or at least realise that change is possible. You can see that from the painfulness that something beautiful has occurred, and that begins to give it meaning. And if there's one thing about the human condition it's that all things are bearable if they have meaning...

...There's a paradox, a tension between the desire we have to let go of ourselves, to become without boundary (this is very beautiful but very terrifying) and the horror of finding ourselves completely hemmed in by boundaries, unable to make choices.... And there's something about music in particular... that allows us to find/project/ discover/make within that fabric of sound identifications with the most profound inner conditions.  This may be what music exists for...

For quite a long period I would take my string quartet to play in hospitals and we would often be playing for people who had truly diabolical situations, and sorrows. People do face big issues when they're that ill. To begin with, naively, we used to take in music that was broadly 'cheerful', what ever that means! But no; what we found was that if we took something like Schubert's Death of a Maiden or Schostakovitch's 8th quartet, this was the greatest consolation.

I can only theorize as to why this might be. We can all recognize that there's something extraordinarly uplifiting about recognizing that somebody has made something beautiful from being in such a condition themselves. There's something extremely liberating because even though we are taken up and gripped by music we always actually have choice so that the locus of control remains with us. And the very fact that we can chose to enter the searing emotional world of Shostakovich knowing that we can choose to step out -- we're free not to be there -- gives us an extraordinary philosphical freedom, which is what we are looking for.

From a rough transcript of remarks by Prof Paul Robinson,  interviewed by Stephen Johnson for Into the Light, an approach to Shostakovitch that was rebroadcast yesterday.