April
April 4, 1964
You gave me two recordings of Wanda Landowska and I have listened to them. In one of them, there’s a passage which is a pure marvel.[[It is the transcription, by W. Landowska, of a "popular Polish song." ]]
Isn’t it!
It doesn’t last long – it’s like crystal.
Yes, exactly! I found it extraordinary.
It’s so beautiful! I’ve never heard anything so pure.
Pure, yes, absolutely pure!
That’s a divine means of expression. It’s really a divine manifestation on earth….
Yes, very pure – and simple.
I have always wondered why I wasn’t born a musician….
You must have been a musician.
It’s really a regret in my life not to be a musician. Writing is NEVER “it.” But capturing a note like that one …
Oh, mon petit, yesterday or the day before, I heard something … I don’t exactly know what it is – it isn’t music, I mean it isn’t the notation of some musical instrument: it’s the notation of a vibration of … I can’t say, I didn’t understand. [[It was electronic music. ]] But in it … At first, you feel exactly as if you had entered a madhouse: it’s completely incoherent, disjointed, and everything is unexpected because there is no logic – absolutely nothing mental. So you go from one sound to another, without any transition, and your first impression is exactly like … it’s madness. But if you listen, now and then
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there’s a sound, which isn’t the sound of a musical instrument … absolutely wonderful! But it lasts one second. You would like it to continue – pfft! gone. And now and then there is a voice, quite like the human voice, you can almost hear words, there seem to be words – which made me think that the sound of our voice has its origin elsewhere (below or above, I don’t know; where those vibrations come from I cannot say). And after a while, I saw that something in the being [Mother's being] was … I can’t say “interested,” it was something that enjoyed it, that didn’t exactly have a “pleasant” sensation, but almost felt a need for the unforeseen, an unforeseen beyond all that we can imagine: disjointed, no logic, no sense, nothing. It SOUNDS like chaos, but all of a sudden I felt it wasn’t chaos, it responded to another law. And when it came towards the end, I really wanted it to go on for a long time.
At first, you start laughing, you make fun of it, you giggle as if you were faced with something absolutely farcical. But now and then, oh! … And you’ve hardly had the time to appreciate it when it’s already gone – a marvel. A marvel: a sound the like of which I have never heard, which no instrument can produce.
You go through all kinds of states, but curiously enough, I discovered in the being, somewhere in the consciousness, a sort of joy or intense interest in the absolutely unexpected – the unexpected, which to the mentality is unspeakably farcical.
Interesting.
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