(no subject)

[circumfession]

I shamelessly love holiday music. My favorites are the old latin chants (and modern smoashborgs that retain the grandeur and eerieness of the latin--yay, Medieval Babes!) and baroque-era choir music....Handel, Beethoven, Mendensoln. There's something about listening to a song in either romance or germanic languages--languages that I don't speak, but share a root with English--that especially especially speaks to me. I think it's because I can almost--not quite--but almost understand. I catch the sense of that desire to speak...that grandeur and expression that's carried in the music, and in clips of words that resemble (but may be false cognates) with the languages that I do understand. It's that desire for understanding and communication that translates...that I find to be so transporting.

I'm starting to understand why Thomas De Quincey loved Italian operas...especially because his Italian is apparently worse than my German, and he could only understand 1/10th of the words....