The Sacred And The Sensual

Here's a beautifully and thoughtfully written piece by concert pianist and blogger Jeremy Denk of Think Denk concerning the sacred and the sensual in music.

It is incredibly difficult to step from the sacred to the sensual, or vice versa, convincingly. Many composers have stumbled there, at the perceived threshold of transcendence. You might argue the journey sacred-sensual (round-trip super-saver fare) was the project of much of the later 19th century, a project which mostly failed. The most colossal, brilliant failure to cross this divide was Liszt’s. Oh he felt it alright, the need to merge sensual and sacred, perhaps more than anyone. He was, in "real" life, the poster-child of this paradox. But then, it seems, he couldn’t be objective enough about it to paint it for the rest of us. His failures are almost always of tone, a failure to be able to be taken seriously at his most passionate: a incapacity to see beyond himself to imagine the rejuvenating, remorseless, creative cynicism of the human mind, which tolerates only so much bombast before destroying it with rolled eyes.

His sacred moments are either strangely sensual or annoyingly self-righteous; his sensual moments often disintegrate into hedonistic wandering....

Word!

RTWT here.