PERHAPS one reason why music is made so prominent among the revelations vouchsafed us of heaven, is because it imperatively requires living agency for its production.
For I think that from this connection music produced by mere clockwork is fairly excluded: ingenious it may be, but inferior it cannot but be.
Music, then, demands the living voice for its utterance, or, at the least, the living breath or the living finger to awaken a lifeless instrument. Written notes are not music until they find a voice.
Written words are words even while unuttered, for, they convey through the eye an intellectual meaning. But musical notes express sound, and nought beside sound.
A silent note, then, is a silent sound: and what can a silent sound be?
The music of heaven, to become music, must have trumpeters and harpers as well as harps and trumpets, must have singers as well as songs.
“Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God.
. . . As well the singers as the players on instruments shall be there.”
~Christina Rossetti
Time Flies
February 10
