Just a thought …

I have been listening, as I often do, to the music of Bohuslav Martinu. I first encountered it in high school, while Martinu was still alive. They often played his late piece, Three Frescoes of Piero della Francesco, on the radio. But the first piece of his that I got to know well was his fifth symphony, and that was some years later. At any rate, I became a passionate admirer of his music and once even gave a talk on him at Haverford College.

Listening this morning to his first cello concerto, I noticed how well he sensed that the century's rhythm was martial and mechanical. His melodies temper the abrasiveness of this while often drawing from it  both pungency and poignancy. This prompted me to wonder at how scientific rationalism — a major player in 20th-century thought — seems always to arrive at a mechanistic view of reality. The theist looks for a person behind things. The rationalist sees everything as, in the long run,  one big machine. Science, of course, is really only about mechanics, so it is hardly surprising that it should see an Almighty Mechanism behind things, or underlying them. I suppose that makes Almighty Evolution a counterpart to the Logos or the Tao. 

Here is Martinu's late and wondrous fourth piano concerto. A wondrous performance as well.

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