REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC AND OPERA
II
In primitive proto-music, the percussion instruments which best
imitate recurrent rhythms and, being incapable of melody, can
least imitate novelty, play the greatest role.
•
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the
most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
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Music cannot imitate nature: a musical storm always sounds like
the wrath of Zeus.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music
is immediate, it goes on to become. But both are active, both insist
on stopping or going on. The medium of passive reflection is paint–
ing, of passive immediacy the cinema, for the visual world is an im–
mediately given world where Fate is mistress and it is impossible to
tell the difference between a chosen movement and an involuntary
reflex. Freedom of choice lies, not in the world we see, but in our
freedom to turn our eyes in this direction or that, or to close them
altogether.
Because music expresses the opposite experience of pure volition
and subjectivity (the fact that we cannot shut our ears at will allows
music to assert that we cannot not choose), film music is not music
but a technique for preventing us from using our ears to hear ex–
traneous noises and it is bad film music if we become consciously
aware of its existence.
•
Man's musical imagination seems to be derived almost ex-
clusively from his primary experiences-his direct experience of his
own body, its tensions and rhythms, and his direct experience of
desiring and choosing-and to have very little to do with the ex–
periences of the outside world brought to
him
through his senses.
The possibility of making music, that is, depends primarily, not
upon man's possession of an auditory organ, the ear, but upon
his
possession of a sound-producing instrument, the vocal cords.
If
the ear were primary, music would have begun .as programme
pastoral symphonies. In the case of the visual arts, on the other
