Anecdotal Evidence: `The Part That Sings'

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Part That Sings'
Excerpt:
In “The Pleasures of Music,” an article he wrote for The Saturday Evening Post in 1959, Copland lauds Beethoven as “one of the great yea-sayers among creative artists” and Bach for the “marvelous rightness” of his work. He celebrates adroitness, energy, what Moore praises as “gusto”: “All of us … can understand and feel the joy of being carried forward by the flow of music. Our love of music is bound up with its forward motion.”

Both artists note the primacy of song, the most joyous of human expressions. In the final verse of “What Are Years,” (Marianne) Moore writes:

“So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.”