Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

It’s too late for a serious effort here tonight: the memsahib and I spent the evening in Prospect Park, enjoying the New York Philharmonic’s annual outdoor concert.

It was a splendid event, and well worth the arduous half-block trek to the park. The weather, by some freak accident, was delightful, with balmy breezes and a spectacular sunset, and the program could hardly have been better: Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, and Sibelius’s Finlandia, with the rousing overture from Carmen as an encore, and an exuberant fireworks display to cap off the show.

The Bach in particular, played just as the sun sank below the horizon, was so very beautiful. It would be easy, in the presence of such sublime genius, such staggering artistic splendor, such incomparable musicianship, to imagine that such gifts must be a clear sign of a transcendent and loving Mind from which such blessings flow, that they simply must come to us from some higher source than the coarse material processes of the natural world.

Naaaaaaaaah.

3 Comments

  1. JK says

    No transcendant Mind there. Man only is able to induce the feeling among men approaching the completely sublime. Carlos Santana with Abraxas, the White Album, Led Zep II, Shelby Lynn, Canned Heat, Ten Years After, the New York Philharmonic, Bach, Mozart.

    Transcendant Mind with His/Her various opinions, doesn’t have an opinion.

    I think ol’ JK is gonna run into some flying spaghetti with this one.

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90995819

    Maybe we can get over it, just thinking.

    Posted July 15, 2008 at 12:33 am | Permalink
  2. Malcolm channeling Steve Martin.

    Jeffery Hodges

    * * *

    Posted July 18, 2008 at 10:41 pm | Permalink
  3. Malcolm says

    Guilty as charged.

    Posted July 18, 2008 at 10:51 pm | Permalink

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