https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_SFnC78K6QE
Bach is hard to listen to. You have to listen to his pieces over and over. At least I do. I don’t suppose you have to if you’re a musical genius. But because Gould interpreted them personally, it was easier to take the music apart and understand in an auditory way what Bach was trying to do. Music helps demonstrate the reality of meaning. And it does that for everyone. It does that for people who are deeply atheistic or even nihilistic. And that’s interesting too because you can take bitterly disaffected punk rockers and they listen to music and they’re overwhelmed by a sense of, it’s really a sense of religious meaning. They don’t even notice it except that without it they’d be in trouble. Some people who, they’re low in openness which is a psychological trait, and they’re pretty opaque to what art represents. And so they have a hard time with it. Or maybe they need more, less sophisticated It’s too shocking to them if it’s sophisticated and profound. They can’t handle it. Lots of people are terrified by art. They like things. They like music. They like kitsch. Because if it’s real, it’s too much for them. They’re terrified of it. They’ll say, I don’t like that. It’s like, it isn’t that they don’t like it. It’s that they can’t handle it. They’re afraid of it. People are even afraid of colour. You know, that’s why everybody uses beige in their decorating. They’re afraid of dreams. They’re terrified of colour. So people are terrified of deep truths. And no wonder. So they wouldn’t be deep if they weren’t terrifying. When we look at the world we see objects, handleable and usable objects in motion. But that isn’t really what the world is like. What the world is like is a set of interlocking and interconnected patterns at multiple levels of resolution from the tiniest to the largest all playing together in a patterned and somewhat predictable manner. Not completely predictable, like music isn’t completely predictable. And so the reason that music is meaningful when you listen to it is because music demonstrates to you what the structure of the universe is actually like. And your senses, your visual sense blinds you to that because it’s more practical in a way. It shows you what you need to live right now. Whereas music gives you this sculptural picture of quantized patterns interacting at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously. And that infuses people with a sense of meaning. Our truly artistic production is full of inarticulate meaning. It’s inarticulate because it’s still in the developmental stage before articulate knowledge. And so it grips people with a sense of significance, but they can’t necessarily say why. And the reason they can’t say why is because the why for that kind of meaning hasn’t been explicated yet. The reason that art is meaningful to people is because art is meaningful. It’s full of the next set of ideas. That’s one way of looking about it. Or it’s full of eternal ideas that people still haven’t fully comprehended. And so you can’t help but be gripped by it.