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I have seen and heard the magnificent Yo-Yo Ma play Vivaldi live at Carnegie Hall. And now I hear him again as I sit spinning on the cd, drinking in the laser light. What he and Vivaldi accomplish is the carrying of music as close to the edge of merged media experience without betraying its purity.
In the early 20th century, many critics and scholars considered music to be the purest of the art forms. The purest because it was self-contained, non-representational, a dimensional world that provided its own, unrelated sensory experience. They contended that incidental and background music, songs, opera, musicals—all representational by design—dilute that purity. And with the advent of film, music became a co-dependent in an uneven marriage of media.
Someday, somewhere, someone will take the beauty of Yo-Yo Ma and Vivaldi into their hands and pour it into the flow of other media as a singular, magical dimension in which we can experience the art of our lives… alone.
Until that time, I'll keep spinning in a bath of red light.
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