Out of The Musical Loop
In Baltimore I didn’t have any music for five days. Nothing. My mp3 player was left back beside the way to slow computer on my desk in the lab, as I had apparently consumed far more Dead Guy Ale (which is delicious, but surprisingly alcoholic) then required to remember to grab it. Then there was about a fifteen minute window to drive my girlfriend back home and 
get back to my place for the lab crew to pick me up for the drive down 81.
Well, anyway, the point was that I didn’t have any music. I had Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 2 running through my head all through the conference. I was tip-tapping the timpani at the end of the first movement through all the inappropriate lectures on k this and c that and DNA, RNA and what-have-you. There were glimpses of the late Beethoven string quartets flittering around the freshly daylit room when my eyes opened, but no satisfaction - nothing more tangible than in-head echoing.
And when I got back it seemed more distant, instead of drawing me directly back in. The music was disappointed with my absence and won’t give me attention until I give it some. Seriously though, despite the painful faffing around with words there’s truth in them there sentencing. It’s hard to get back sometimes. There are off patches, weeks where I want to listen to the birds and the kids and the wind while I am walking into work, instead of Beethoven.
John Cage was onto something, I think…
I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent piece… for an audience of myself, since they were much longer than the popular length which I have published. At one performance… the second movement was extremely dramatic, beginning with the sounds of a buck and a doe leaping up to within ten feet of my rocky podium.
No matter how engaging, how beautiful nor how directly music speaks to you, the outside world is always stronger. The balance of both is the ideal.