Keyboard Warriors

Stravinsky puts it pithily enough: Music “expresses nothing outside of itself.” It’s a dictum that puts critics like me on the back foot, accusing us of peddling only a pale and inadequate imitation of the thing itself. Those who can’t, write. But it also describes a deeper sense of music as incommensurable, elevated by thinkers like Walter Pater or Schopenhauer above all the other arts because its expressive language is an exquisite fusion of subject and form. Music sheds the earth-bound burden of representation, and, the thinking goes, is transcendent, even universal, because it is not tethered to an outside. Music, Pater has it, is “the ideally consummate art.”