 
                         20051202.00

     How do we communicate? How do we reach an understanding
with one another? How do we learn to speak the same language?
The instrumental ensemble both unites and separates.  Each
player intent on and perfecting his own part, making his
contribution to, but subordinating himself to the whole.
(Quite different from the economics of Adam Smith.)

     One should stop looking for the perfect piece of music.
Looking for the perfect piece of music is like looking for
the perfect human being.  It doesn't exist. Much better to be
realistic and try to fathom what it is, rather than to
project onto it what one idealizes that it should be.

     Perhaps a suitable place to start might be the Air (No.
23) of the second part of Haendel's Messiah: "He was despised
and rejected", a translation into music of Isaiah 53:3.  It
is significant that the original King James Version
description is in the present tense: "He _is_ despised and
rejected", as distinct from the text written by Charles
Jennens "He _was_ despised and rejected".  Haendel must not
have noticed or cared, or he would have made the correction.

     One might begin by pointing out the coincidence of
Isaiah's insight with Plato's description of the perfectly
just man:

     "let us place the just man in his nobleness and
     simplicity, wishing, as Aeschylus says, to be and not to
     seem good. There must be no seeming, for if he seem to
     be just he will be honored and rewarded, and then we
     shall not know whether he is just for the sake of
     justice or for the sake of honor and rewards; therefore,
     let him be clothed in justice only, and have no other
     covering; and he must be imagined in a state of life the
     opposite of the former. Let him be the best of men, and
     let him be thought the worst; then he will have been put
     to the proof; and we shall see whether he will be
     affected by the fear of infamy and its consequences. And
     let him continue thus to the hour of death; being just
     and seeming to be unjust....  The just man who is
     thought unjust will be scourged, racked, bound -- will
     have his eyes burnt out; and, at last, after suffering
     every kind of evil, he will be impaled. Then he will
     understand that he ought to seem only, and not to be,
     just; ... Plato, Republic II, 357a - 367e


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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
