A mystery of sorts ...

Encouraged by Terry Teachout, I bought a recording of Constant Lambert conducting his own music, including his ballet Horoscope. This must have been the recording I heard over the radio when I was in high school. Listening to it now I am not only affected as I was then, but in such a way that it is almost as if I were that teenager listening to it so long ago. What I mean is that I not only feel the sense of longing and melancholy - I am thinking of "Invocation to the Moon and Finale" - that I felt then, but I feel it as if it were then, as if I were the boy I was then. It is a peculiarly unsettling feeling and hard to account for. Though in this column, Terry himself comes as close to explaining as I syuppose anyone can: " Music, after all, is the most enveloping of the arts, the only one that creates the illusion of occupying both time and space. Live theater comes close, but it lacks music's all-encompassing quality. To enter into the presence of a piece of music, be it a Schubert sonata or a single by Metallica, is to be surrounded and permeated by its essence. The air is full of it -- and the clock is ruled by it. You can't get away from music, which explains its unparalleled power to disorient and disturb." And it can transport through you time.

Here is a piece about Lambert by Andrew Motion: Once more, with feeling.