Music and place
In this quiet room above the sea I've just played the fourth [Beethoven Piano Concerto] again. I know it now - every stitch of it - more intimately than I know Nancy [LD's wife]. I've got it in my bowels. Sort of empathy. I've been it, I act it, sleep it, shit it, sleep it - everything. And I can tell you that compared to it, the Emperor is a collection of musical platitudes written for a lavatory-paper musical box by a deaf mute. So There! Lawrence Durrell wrote those words in Corfu in 1935. I took the photo above at the Lac du Der Chantecoq in the Champange-Ardenne region of France last week. During the three weeks we spent on campsites in remote locations in rural France I was struck once again when listening to my iPod , as to how place affect the way music is heard. Just as light determines the way we see a landscape, so the aura of a place seems to change our perspective on a familiar piece of music. The mystical relation between music and place is nothing new