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Portia in The Merchant of Venice speaks
of a music that everyone has within them: “The man that hath no music in
himself . . . let no such man be trusted.”
Those people
who are only preoccupied
with the formula that will yield them the best results, without ever having
listened to the still small voice of music within themselves, would do
well to think on these words. And so would those who most ingeniously juggle
around with bars, as if they were no more than pathetic little squares
of paper. That is the kind of music that smells of the writing desk, or
of carpet slippers. (I mean that in the special sense used by mechanics
who, when trying out a badly assembled machine, say,
“That smells of oil.”)
We should distrust the writing of music: it is an occupation for
moles, and it ends up by reducing the vibrant beauty of sound itself to
a dreadful system where two and two make four. Music has known for a long
time what the mathematicians call “the folly of numbers.”
Claude Debussy
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