What I Hear When I Read

The serious study began with Shostakovich, and it has not yet ended. The first quartet in particular — the long first movement, the deliberately flat second, the long second movement that ends without resolution — seems to ask the question the rest of the archive is trying to answer: what does music remember on behalf of those who cannot?

Mozart arrived in the same year, and the contrast is the point. Where Shostakovich remembers, Mozart forgives; where Shostakovich compresses, Mozart unfolds. The two repertoires hold each other in productive tension.

Chopin is for the late nights and the structural questions. Bizet is for what cannot be said. Nirvana is for the body in pain.

Music is treated here as a method, not a hobby. The Music & Psychology project (WP-002 in the archive) operationalises what the programme notes here describe.

“What does music remember on behalf of those who cannot?” — the question that organises this page.