'The vision thing', the President called it - burdening the word for all time with a carapace of cynicism and the odour of expediency. To cleanse it, back to Wordsworth: '.....And by the vision splendid is on his way attended'. ¹

The glory and the agony of a musician's life are one and the same: the attending vision is both the spur and the beacon, a siren call impossible to resist and a bubble of perfection that floats maddeningly away just as one reaches to grasp it. Students often ask me whether I would advise them to choose a career as a performer, and I always say 'No'. Why? Because they asked. I was always afraid to ask that question - in case No was the answer; I did not choose music, the vision chose me, and I remain seduced, haunted, comforted and mesmerised by it.

My first response to music was through the movement of the body. I grew up in a small New Zealand town where 'The Orchestra' came but once a year to play, and where the radio was companion and lifeline. Often in the enchantment of half-darkness, I would hug myself with the excitement of encountering a Brahms concerto, a Tchaikovsky symphony, and rise to embrace the friendly shadows the music created in my mind to dance about the house with me, a six-year-old discovering the power of music to enthral and possess.

'Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy' ², and subjection to the discipline of the years of study that followed my magical early experiences brought awareness of much else in the music, other than that first unquestioned and hypnotic power. But although discrimination was learned, sensibilities refined, perceptions tuned, there was never any sense of imprisonment by this tantalising, ever-present muse. Rather did the vision give me freedom. I have always felt shackled by the daily round and its common tasks, the irritations of everyday life, by all the intimations of mortality through which we plod. The vision showed me a different world; more than showed - it took my hand and drew me into it, a world boundless, beauteous, shining and perfect; a world that was serious but never insincere, where truth reigned but was never judgemental; a world that existed in my mind and was made up of oscillating frequencies but seemed to me infinitely more real and substantial and above all sane than the one we have agreed to call the physical world but which, come to think of it, is also made up of oscillating frequencies but ones that jangle and are ill-tuned and chaotic.

It sounds like escapism, and it is an escape, but for a musician it is an escape into reality rather than from it. And one is not alone there; in fact less so than in the lonely company of a crowd. For it is a meeting-place of like minds, and it is a means of sending a message free of the hazards and limitations of speech and the written word, with all their possibilities of misinterpretation and mistranslation. The composer Olivier Messiaen devised a 'musical language' - a specific set of parallels in musical notation for words and grammar - to convey favourite quotations; but he admitted that it was 'a game' ³, and would have been shooting himself in the foot had he not, as he also wrote longingly of the angels' power to convey thought without speech but directly heart to heart. This is what music does; and we need it precisely because it does what words can not. Just as spiritual revelation bypasses the process of weighing up logistical evidence, the message of music can be received by each listener at his own level and in his state of preparedness, and it is all the truer for it. (The former in particular is much criticised because of this lack of verification through argument, but that does not lessen its importance to the recipient.)

One meets there not only like minds receiving the message but the mind of the composer who sent it. There is also, and most importantly, the essence of the piece itself, what might be called the mind of the music. It is usually taken for granted that this is synonymous with that of the composer, but I do not think it is. A work of art takes on a life of its own, one that may have more elements than the composer, consciously at any rate, gave it. Michelangelo's description of sculpting as the releasing of a figure from the marble is familiar, and while a composer undoubtedly carves and chips and moulds, the process is surely analogous, just as a novelist will often say that when he creates his characters he does not know every action they will take but observes them as they act out their lives within his pages. Mozart's account of the manner of his own receiving of a composition is interesting in this regard:

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