Only people as catastrophically divorced from our souls and ourselves as we have become could be so confused as to think that the purpose of music is ‘entertainment’. The idea is so ridiculous that I cannot even compose an appropriate analogy for it. Like actually confusing the stars with disposable party lights? Like understanding kissing as nothing more than a peculiar custom of certain cultures… and believing that reduction?

The purpose of music cannot be abstracted into language, but is, in part to participate in an ancient set of relationships through an ongoing process of listening and emoting/expressing. A process of call and response which comprises a relationship whose rhythms become those of our lives and hearts. Making music is the direct personal participation in those relationships, and they are alive in a sense that is far beyond what may be easily denoted.

The call-response patterns so common in music today are direct evidence of the ongoing process of the abstraction of these primordial relationships into product. The first necessity of this is that the victims must be denied the natural recollection of music and its power. They are thus shown endless images of music as something ‘to make you have fun’.

How sad for us moderns that we have no recollection of what this entire relationship is about… because ‘that to which we might call or respond’ has acquired the likenesses of the strangest kinds of formidable nonsense. But it has no such identity. What we call to is so pure that only music will suffice for communion. And what responds is so exquisite that language could never hope to convey it…