Music is the act of summoning demons.
Examine the setting: it can be done anywhere, but when it's at its most powerful, it occurs in rarified palatial halls and in diseased, foreboding dungeons. Excluding Hell itself, there are no more fitting places for a demon.
Examine the players: They read from ancient texts, complete with its own rune-like language, annotated only in extrinsic tongues. They train and compete, joining cults under charismatic and severe leaders (with magic wands), or else they meet and form covens and brew strange libations.
In guises of great atmosphere, often just as the Earth has slipped into twilight, they gather. They begin with the grandiose rituals. Even the captive audience is given a part to play, expected (forced?) to declare their devotion many times.
And there, given sweat and spirit and blood, the demon is summoned into the hall. But when the spell is broken, the demon evaporates - it cannot be held, only beheld.
Music is the only artform that can successfully summon a demon.
Visual art always aims to capture the beast, but in the end is left merely with fragments or impressions.
Dancers do not summon the beast, but they do give themselves over to it and for a time and are extensions of the creature.
Actors and Playwrights create facsimiles through which we are meant to see the minglings and interferences of the demons, but they are there only in bas relief, no more tangible than in our ordinary life.
Poetry is, of course, the captured madness of one who has looked the beast square in its eye and lived to tell the tale.
Examine the players: They read from ancient texts, complete with its own rune-like language, annotated only in extrinsic tongues. They train and compete, joining cults under charismatic and severe leaders (with magic wands), or else they meet and form covens and brew strange libations.
In guises of great atmosphere, often just as the Earth has slipped into twilight, they gather. They begin with the grandiose rituals. Even the captive audience is given a part to play, expected (forced?) to declare their devotion many times.
And there, given sweat and spirit and blood, the demon is summoned into the hall. But when the spell is broken, the demon evaporates - it cannot be held, only beheld.
Music is the only artform that can successfully summon a demon.
Visual art always aims to capture the beast, but in the end is left merely with fragments or impressions.
Dancers do not summon the beast, but they do give themselves over to it and for a time and are extensions of the creature.
Actors and Playwrights create facsimiles through which we are meant to see the minglings and interferences of the demons, but they are there only in bas relief, no more tangible than in our ordinary life.
Poetry is, of course, the captured madness of one who has looked the beast square in its eye and lived to tell the tale.