Now, what is music? This question occupied me for hours before I fell asleep last night. Music is a strange thing. I would almost say it is a miracle. For it stands halfway between thought and phenomenon, between spirit and matter, a sort of nebulous mediator, like and unlike each of the things it mediates, spirit that requires manifestation in time and matter that can do without space.
We do not know what music is.
~ Heinrich Heine (1797-1856, German poet)
Letters on the French Stage
Quoted in Opera in America, by John Dizikes, Yale University Press, 1993.
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