Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten perform Britten’s arrangement of the English folk song “O Waly, Waly” (The water is wide) on the BBC in 1964:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“That a pattering of sounds on the ear should have such moment is a fact calculated to give pause to those philosophers who attempt to explain consciousness by its utility, or who wish to make physical and moral processes march side by side from all eternity. Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions. That the way in which idle sounds run together should matter so much is a mystery of the same order as the spirit’s concern to keep a particular body alive, or to propagate its life.”
George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress