The pinnacle of that view of freedom, of course, is avant-garde jazz, which I find by and large a dead loss. It operates on the assumption that if you remove all constraints from people, they will behave in some especially inspired manner. This doesn’t seem to me to be true in any sense at all — not socially, and certainly not artistically. The point is that the typical jazz or even rock concept of improvisation is based on the theory of the individual breaking loose of something. The African version is based on the idea of the individual making an important, timely contribution to a social event. Talking Heads is an ideal example of that kind of communion: their whole style involves sociorhythmic interconnectedness

Brian Eno, 1981, via 

 Audio musicam ergo sum

Music supplies us with a first clue. What part of me hears music when I listen to it? My body trembles, dances, kicks up its heels, perhaps jumps with joy; music innervates and stretches  the  muscles,  accelerates  the  pulse,  moves  the  stomach and stimulates the genitals. My intellect counts, unconsciously, admiring the harmonic composition and construction of counterpoint. My hearing, in its delight, floods the whole sensory system with musical waves; inner rhythms and tempos keep time with the same metronome. My feelings move me to tears and fill me with happiness—all these bonds, suddenly global, construct my unity. No part of me is unaffected by the mute ecstasy that listening to music induces. Music seizes me, holds me spell-bound, passes through me, possesses me, makes me all its own, causes some unknown federative and existential function to operate in me, unifying the integral of what I am, like an immense embrace—this intense ecstasy that is called existence. I listen to music, therefore I am.

Michel Serres, Religion

(via Matt Moore)