Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Friday, October 30, 2009, 20:54 (5502 days ago) @ dhw

'The "supreme experiences" you receive from certain works of classical music are of huge importance to me too (another time, we can swap names).'-Is that allowed? Talk about OT! My first great love was Gustav Mahler, whom I experienced as a 16 year old, in Bruno Walter's recording of the 2nd Symphony. That love has been abiding. It's obscene how many recordings I have of his symphonies. I soon also fell in love with Bruckner. For some reason, those two composers have always been closely associated, although they could not be more different. Only the scale of the compositions are similar.-Decades later I discovered Bach. Oh, I'd been listening to him (and Handel) since high school, but by "discovered" I mean, "what he was all about." I would "dutifully" listen to the B Minor Mass because I knew it was supposed to be a masterpiece of the ages, but it wasn't until I heard a period instrument performance of it about 1980 (Harnoncourt) that his world (and Baroque music in general) really opened up to me. It was a revelation! However, long before that, his organ music had led me to formulate the statement, "When Bach picked up his pen, God took over." I found divinity in the organ music even before I discovered period instruments, but not the orchestral and vocal music, until Harnoncourt opened my eyes. Soon it was Pinnock and Hogwood, and so on and so forth.-I fell in love with Handel's Oratorios in high school, even though they weren't performed "authentically." In my early 20's, I made up my mind to buy every one of his oratorios and operas, and I own dozens of them on CD now. Almost all my Handel recordings on on period instruments. I also have extensive collections of Purcell and Rameau, and a bunch of other 17th and 18th century composers.-"We obviously differ in their ultimate effect, and also in the fact that even those works that make me sad have never led to depression."-Music has never made me sad, even the most tragic works: Tchaikovsky's 6th, Mahler's 6th (one of my all time favorite works), etc. I think Tchaikovky's 5th is more tragic than the 6th, because he was trying to be joyful but it all seemed put on. I find the 6th a lot more honest.-Anyhow, what I mean when I say music has never made me sad, I mean while I was listening to it. I could appreciate the tragedy in Mahler's 6th and the anguish in the 9th, but while listening to it, it didn't depress me in the list. I could listen over and over and not get depress by the music itself. It's the beauty of music the moved me profoundly, never to sadness, but to profound joy. It was only in my agnostic period that after the fact I would question the validity of those deep feelings I had, in the sense that what those feeling touched had no essential ground. I rationalized that it was all made up in my head, and it was not getting down to something deeper. That depressed me, never the music itself, while I was listening. Music itself has never made me sad, and if it had, I wouldn't have listened to it.-"this is in no way diluted by the awareness that there may be nothing beyond the human mind that created it." I on the other hand believe that all aesthetic creation stems from the divine, regardless of whether the creator was an adamant atheist.