It took me a long time to figure that out. I finally broke down and read Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and thought "wow, this is amazing!"
Then a light went off in my head and I thought "yeah, it's a classic"
The thought occurred sometime back: it's narrative that underlies all art. This is the complete antithesis of the reductive tendencies of modernism; there is no such thing as pure art or pure music that can be distilled down to some abstract essence. In other words, song and verse is the root and wellspring of music. If a performer loses that narrative thread, the music goes flat. I've had enough of this arid crap.
I think this connection of music and language acquisition tends to buoy this understanding.
holy mackeral, I am reading Reflections right now! In fact, I just got out of a discussion group on it a half hour ago!!!
Truly a classic and like all classics perennially applicable...the way Burke and we understand the world is completely unlike obama. obama in fact is like a Revolutionary and he deserves the treatment that Burke gave to Price and the revolutionaries.
You know what else is funny? For the class, at the beginning, I told the students that Burke was too good but too rich to truly master in the short time we have with him. So I played them the first movement of Bach’s cantata BWV 140. I told them in that nine minutes of music they could “hear” everything that Burke was saying......
You are so right. Distilling music down to “pure music” is basically reducing flesh and blood men to mere Citizens, where it is them and the State. There is no such thing as pure citizenship (that would be simple slavery) any more than there is such a thing as “pure music”. Can you imagine Bach wanting to strip his complex compositions of everything in order to make it “pure”? Complete rubbish.