Yet there is one thing the world with all its rottenness cannot take from us, and that is the deep abiding joy and consolation perpetuated in great music. Here the spirit may find home and relief when all else fails. When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed its point. There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that doesnot find relief in music. And people are always missing that part of the life-melody.
Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
Auden Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory. Thomas Beecham Music has charms to soothe a savage beast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.