Jan Swafford's Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music, is chatty and fun — a presto series of scherzos, short chapters of biography and anecdotes (including some too naughty to quote here!) plus commentary and recommendations for listening-learning. As Swafford summarizes it all in "Conclusions":

So, there's our tour of Western music from eons back to a few years ago. How do I, as a composer and writer, add all this up? Music is here to enjoy, to love, to be fascinated and moved and instructed and amused and scared and exalted by. I believe that a composer's job is to provide those experiences for us. If and when audiences for classical music are ready to be moved by myriad voices and languages, when audiences are as excited about hearing something new as they were in Mozart's day — then music will thrive. The works being composed today are part of an ongoing experiment in that direction.

To finish, I want again to take note of the stupendous scope of the music l've talked about. One of the great virtues of Western music is not only its enormous technical journey from monody to polyphony to homophony, from evolving tonality to evolving atonality, triads to tone clusters, simplicity to complexity, a small palette of colors to an enormous palette, austere to impassioned, calculated to crazed. It has also shown an ability to absorb into itself ideas and voices from around the world, and from popular music and jazz, while still remaining itself. For me the incomparable breadth of reference and style over the past millennium may be the most remarkable aspect of Western classical music. Of course, we haven't seen the end of that evolution and never will.

What do I foresee in the future? I decline to speculate. A recent study found that when it comes to prognostication, there's no difference between prophecies of the future and random outcomes. Whatever happens, it will not be what anybody predicted, unless by accident. What we can say is that the human spirit is endlessly creative, and musicians like all artists will keep doing what they do. In the process they will continue to reveal beautiful, sublime, enchanting, provoking, frightening, fascinating, exalted, comic, rude, marvelous things. Whether presented in terms of sounds, strings, brass, stone, wood, canvas, film, paint, or what have you, in the end art is all made of the same inexhaustible material as the human spirit.

Along the way the delightful stories make for a fast and pleasant voyage across centuries of musical discovery.

_{(cf Buechner Magic (2000-12-27), Music Library (2001-04-18), Music Master (2001-06-04), Musical Values (2001-11-03), Mantra - Notice the Music (2014-12-06), Winter's Tale on Music Everywhere (2014-12-23), ...) - ^z - 2024-10-23}