spontanaeity, a few paragraphs

Rex tremendae majestatis,
qui salvandos salvas gratis,
salva me, fons pietatis.

I miss the clef. It was never about the people or the recognition, though the sense of self-accomplishment and community helped me immeasurably during that time in my life. It was always just about the music, the experience, much like it's simply about the food and its sensual impact on my life now. Music is much like cuisine--it's a self-indulgent career despite the hard work, and it's something that impacts the senses long before the intellect no matter the argument against that. It's also a craft before it's an art. There is a right way to sit up and breathe correctly before there is a creative license to change a score.

The glory of God has nothing to do with the glory of Mozart's requiem mass. The message is one tired and old, but it is the in-the-moment raw physical experience of hearing it, the audible magnificence of human creativity scrawled on a grand staff that is so beautifully shattering to our senses. The chords themselves are more worthy of worship than God--they represent something higher than petty dogma. A mentor of mine once said that music brings people together. Perfection in music does that, secularly, before it incites the ten commandments or glorifies Christ.

Consider this:

"...he notes that even after Italy's unification in the mid-nineteenth century, the country could scarcely converse with one another because all the regions spoke various dialects. Then a guy named Pellegrino Artusi published a book called The Science of Cookery and the Art of Eating Well, written in formal Italian. The book was extraordinarily popular, and people from north to south, east and west read the thing and as a result created a common language for the entire country. Though an Italian man or woman was likely to speak in the local dialect after the book was published in 1891, the cookbook may be credited with determining the language that a century hence all Italians would speak. If a cookbook could determine a country's language, Mariana suggests, then perhaps cookery and the art of eating well are not so shallow and self-indulgent as they may at first seem."

-The Soul of a Chef, Michael Ruhlman

So maybe devoting your life to orgasmically good food isn't so self-indulgent? Whether you're working the line or the score, or delegating in Washington, you can still make momentous contributions to humanity. I guess what I conclude is that both music and cuisine can bring people together. Food for thought.

~Do you see that perfect brunoise? It is a perfect and uniform sixteenth-inch dice, do you know how hard that is to do? Every single one is the same, hundreds of them, like confetti but cut by hand!