Music is of two species. At least, there are two sounds which to me bring ineffable pleasure––I am sure for personal and largely forgotten reasons, though I might retrace these through their web of associations: They are the sound of the rain, and the sound of my wristwatch.
The one is a cadence, and marks time, but unevenly, accidentally, and determined by unseen and unpredictable fate. Lyrical music, ballads, all songs sentimental and impassioned call this to mind. Chopin is a soft drizzle, Wagner a roaring storm. Teresa Teng is the warm rain of early Summer, Meng T'ing-wei the finest mist of the melancholic early Spring. The other is unmistakably artificial, both with the metallic regularity of its sound and the refinement entailed in its purpose, of demarcating the seconds with precision. It sculpts time. Bach above all is the clock of the greatest intricacy, his songs making a sculpture of perfect similarity (I think of the enormous symmetry of his Mass in B Minor). Vivaldi is an eccentric little wristwatch, ticking merrily; Palestrina an old grandfather clock, its pendulum swinging slowly and sonorously.
And both of these species, by their frequency and consistency, create a sort of sonic "ritual space", as a mat may be used to demarcate the ritual space for making tea. These sounds create a self-contained universe, especially in the case of the wristwatch, whose spring, gears, and escapement one can picture working indefatigably in a universe of mathematical perfection. But one is nature raw and powerful, the other man's attempt at distilling nature's perfection.
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