For instance, the first couple of times you heard Johnny Mercer’s lyrics to “That Old Black Magic” you knew them forever. Words live in the shallows of the mind, music in the depths. And that is close to what Theodor Adorno said:
Music is speechlike. . . . But music is not speech. Its speechlikeness points the way into the interior, but also into the vague.
(Quoted from page 3 of Music Speaks: On the Language of Opera, Dance, and Song, by Daniel Albright. University of Rochester Press, 2009.)For a brief biography of Theodor Adorno, click here. For images of and relating to Theodor Adorno, click here. For a brief biography of Daniel Albright, click here.
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