The Everyday Enchantment of Music

The Everyday Enchantment of Music:

Art has many media in which to express ideas. Music, dance, painting, poetry, movies, architecture, you name it. All of them are equally just to explore and to use, not all of them are equally apt to express certain ideas.

For example, if one would want to represent the idea or the spirit of sensuality. How is and can this be represented in art? In which medium? 

Sculpture comes to mind, and yes, there may be moments which live up to the idea of sensuality, but sculpture is in itself a kind of inward, silent, resting media which sensuality is not. 

Painting maybe, there can be found moments of high sensuality in painting, but again, as in sculpture, painting is a resting media, which only shows a momentary, single state. 

Sensuality is hard to put into fixed contours and a set of compositorial elements, for it is a force of passion, energy and impatience which lives not in a single moment but is constantly moving in a succession of moments. If it would live in a single moment it could be painted, photographed or sculpted. Sensuality has an epic character, it has a narrative element but it does not really tell a tale, it has not reached the level of words which are able to do just that. 

Poetry, Literature, have the capability to tell a tale, they do work with words, after all. Yet, they are far too concrete to meet the ever changing, endlessly shapeshifting quality of sensuality. Language is the proper medium for expressing an idea, yet the sensual quality is reduced to descriptions of states which have lost their body and senses, are a mere recounting of experiences without the factual immediacy of bodily, sensual stimulation of the nervous system.

It seems to me that music is the only medium which is roughly able to represent sensuality. Music, like sensuality, has an element of time in it which sculpture and painting do not have. It lives, grows, transforms, changes and dies within time. And it invites us to successively take part, sensually, in these changes and developments. 

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