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Truth and Music
Whenever I hear Mozart’s Don Giovanni I have the same sensation and same thought: Truth. In many parts of the opera I feel I am hearing The Truth. Not any particular truth, not the table is brown or any particular piece of truth, but THE Truth. Perhaps it is what Heraclitus and the Greeks called ‘Logos.’

I’m not sure what it means to say one feels oneself hearing The Truth. What is this truth? What is a sensation of The Truth? The one Truth. Perhaps it is our rules of thought, or the foundation of our thoughts. During this opera I often feel as if touching the bare metal of truth, perhaps as people felt when touching the gown of the pope.

During many musical pieces one feels beauty, or energy, but I think it is relatively unique to feel this sensation of The Truth. Yet even if it’s rare, it is always there, in one way or another. Our listening is always whether it speaks a truth, a truth about emotions, about distances between them (e.g. thinking of Bach and distance between voices).

Music and Mathematics have often been compared and linked. Math, though, is the realm of pure truth and nothing but the truth, while music could seem to be in the realm of pure fiction, having little to do with truth. But to feel The Truth, The Foundation, one can feel from notes just as much as from the many processes of proofs and revelation of intricate structures that mathematics leads us through.


How should we think of this relation of Truth and Music? It's a hard question.

Music Discussed
Mozart: Don Giovanni
Mozart - Don Giovanni / Furtwangler

I just noticed that, interestingly, the scene I linked to could be described as: The moment of truth has come,  as the moment of reckoning is often called.
Perhaps the question of Truth itself is a major question of this opera.

In response to Michel de Graph
Interesting idea. Your post raises Keats, of course, and the linkage of truth and beauty, though you distinguish b/w them. Recently I've been feeling art reveals certain truths in part b/c, almost paradoxically, it is in some ways removed from daily realities. Science strives for specific truths, and is continuously over-ruled or at very least updated. Same w/ history. But while art continues to change, it is not bettered. We will not see greater than Bach or Mozart or Shakespeare, only perhaps, if we're incredibly lucky, their equals or near-equals at some point. And in this sense, of something fairly universal and certainly lasting, there is indeed a quality of trueness.I've been thinking this about certain composers recently, and the emotional insight they give us. I find in these a kind of subtlety, depth, and psychological truth which would be hard to capture by other means. Prose moves linearly; one thing happens at a time. Music is able to express multiple dimensions simultaneously, much as life is experienced. Don Giovanni has a scene in particular where two meters are superimposed; Mozart's ensembles are famous for their complex layering. We can't reduce musical greatness to a single factor; in this sense, it more closely approximates reality's complexity than the traditional 'truth-telling' academic disciplines which are single-minded, logical, and linear in nature. More and more the science of the universe and of the brain supports this 'irrational' / enormously complex reality. Perhaps the greatest of our artistic creators understood this all along.

In response to Sharon Levy
As much as music can raise one to sublime depths (if it's possible to be raised to depths, somewhat of an oxymoron), it is no more The Truth than anything else. Sublime feelings do not mean that one has reached at the Truth. If that were the case, then ecstatic religious feelings would also be seen as reaching The Truth.

If "truth" is different for each person depending on circumstances, then it is not a universal Truth. A truth that is not universal is merely a personal "truth", but certainly not "Truth".
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Latest Post: February 17, 2012 at 7:19 PM
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