One nice feature of the Classic iPod is that it has so much capacity that you can store tens of thousands of tracks of music and play them back in ‘shuffle’ mode --- a vast potpourri of, at least in my iPod’s case, a massive variety of genres and moods.
Today my iPod cycled through into a somewhat obscure piece by the great master J.S. Bach --- Violin and Keyboard Sonata no. 5, BWV 1018, the third movement, the Adagio, played by the inimitable masters Jaime Laredo and Glenn Gould.
A drawn-out series of paired violin notes and chorded double-stops, with slow melodic arpeggios on the piano, swirling through an astonishing progression of chords, pulls us into another, surely more real, realm. The transcendent! The sublime!
Perhaps this isn’t your favorite kind of Classical music; maybe it isn’t your favorite kind of music at all. But can you feel this? Can you hear the voices in the eternal realm? Can you sense the human longing for more, for truth, for real spiritual satisfaction, for…God? Even --- is that suspensive presence in Bach here an attempt to express the actual fulfillment of that satisfaction?