More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Her melody insisted that everyone ended up autonomous in the end. Had they known as much when they were young, they might have grown apart together.
She frowns, wondering if she’s supposed to understand. But perplexity rolls off her as easily as recent history. She belongs to the first generation to use the mantra whatever without exasperation.
He’d always told his students that rests were the most expressive paints in a composer’s palette. The silences were there to make the notes more urgent.
the globe went over the financial brink. The entire web of interlocking con jobs came unraveled. Trillions of dollars disappeared back into fiction.
There was nothing more pressing to do all day, every day, except think about the question that his whole life had failed to answer: How did music trick the body into thinking it had a soul?
The body had evolved to feel fear, hope, thrill, and peace in the presence of certain semi-ordered vibrations; no one knew why.
It made no sense that a few staggered chords could make the brain love an unmet stranger or grieve for friends who hadn’t died.
But all the experts agreed that waves of compressed air falling on the eardrum touched off chain reactions that flooded the body in signals and even changed the expression of genes.
A six-chord sequence could chill a soul or make it see God. A few notes on a shakuhachi unlocked the afterlife. A simple tavern sing-along left millions longing for their nonexistent homes on the range.
The words have stayed with him, through everything. Maybe he botches the exact phrase. Mutation happens.
Twelve chromatic pitches are nowhere near enough. They doom a composer to a series of already explored phrases, progressions, and cadences. They slip a straitjacket over the continuous richness of speech. “The composer yearns for the streaking shades of sunset. He gets red. He longs for geranium, and gets red. He dreams of tomato, but he gets red.
She’s living in a two-page spread from a furniture catalog. The townhouse is as clean as a C major scale.
