Introducing: Verbatim

Music criticism is a sticky endeavor. The lengths to which musicians will go to seek out or avoid it, the efforts publicists undertake to secure it, the negligibly compensated years some endure to produce it--all yielding a literature with a shelf-life of near-zero--make for a cottage industry as vibrantly active as it is doomed to amount to little of lasting value.

(As a tossed-off barometer of this assertion, check out CMU Daily’s report of the Avail Intelligence study which recently found that “music fans no longer look to professional critics to tell them what music to listen to.” Check it out by clicking here and scrolling down to “NO ONE READS YOUR REVIEWS.”)

And so I introduce our new category, Verbatim, wherein we aim to bandy about quotations regarding music and the vast galaxy of language humans spin around and about it.

To pave the way, I quote Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, the first of two books (along with Star Maker) that together form a volume that I call with confidence my favorite book, period. In this pair of very, very loosely labeled “science fiction” stories from the 1930s, Stapledon lays out no less than a history of the cosmos, told first through the story of 18 succeeding species of human intelligence, of which we, as we know ourselves, are but the first, rough draft (Last and First Men). Star Maker then documents Stapledon’s universal vision writ almost inconceivably larger, laying out an imaginative taxonomy of sentience that, before its long, dense tale is done, includes the stars themselves and much, much more.

The book packs more cause for hope and faith in humanity than anything I’ve ever read before or since, and I recommend it with edge-of-my-seat fervor and no qualifications. Despite having grown up in a devout Roman Catholic home, I’ve never come across another read that comes anywhere close to the reverent—indeed, scriptural—heights of Stapledon’s magnum opus.

To the point, then. From Last and First Men:

“As individuals ... we try to regard the whole cosmic adventure as a symphony now in progress, which may or may not someday achieve its just conclusion. Like music, however, the vast biography of the stars is to be judged not in respect of its final moment merely, but in respect of the perfection of its whole form; and whether its form as a whole is perfect or not, we cannot know. Actual music is a pattern of intertwining themes which evolve and die; and these again are woven of simpler members, which again are spun of chords and unitary tones. But the music of the spheres is of a complexity almost infinitely more subtle, and its themes rank above and below one another in hierarchy beyond hierarchy. None but a God, none but a mind subtle as the music itself, could hear the whole in all its detail, and grasp in one act its close-knit individuality, if such it has. Not for any human to say authoritatively, ‘This is music, wholly,’ or to say, ‘This is mere noise, flecked now and then by shreds of significance.’”

Join us. Bring your best musical quotations to the table. We’ll feast together.

Serving well…

     --Jason Kirk