On (Mis)Trusting Music: A Subtext To This Blog

I don’t trust music.

Music shapes and directs my perception too much–telling me when and how to feel. How can it do that? Not just, what gives it the right to do that, but practically speaking, how does it pull off this trick?

I can’t see or touch music, or ever seem to get to the bottom of how it works. It’s a unmaterial thing–like a breeze or a shadow, or like phantom gears for an unseen machine.

Or music is a liquid, always escaping its containers (stylistic, historical, social) and getting away before I can interrogate it.

Powerful, invisible, flexible and fluid, music is some kind of loner.