Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Struggling to Hear

"Each art form has its own unique advantages and limitations. Words and music unfold successively, through time. Photography is about an instant. By analogy it can ask the impossible: in this case, what if you could hear every note of Beethoven's sonatas in an instant? What would that look like? And when we think of a piece of music that we know well, don't we sometimes remember it not phrase by phrase, but in its amorphous entirety?"

— Geoff Dyer, "Idris Khan" in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, 84