The question Michel Ribon asks with this book – question which he also answers in a manner at once philosophical, poetic and aesthetic – is the following: where does music – which doesn’t show or tell us anything specific, and is so enjoyable that it can take us over entirely – come from? The annoying little secret of music slips away to Elsewhere, seeming to scoff at us sweetly.
According to Michel Ribon, listening to music properly means avoiding both the technical interpretation of the connoisseur – who knows the entire oeuvre and no longer hears anything but the technique – and of the amateur, who only wants the piece to soothe the savage beast.
Being open to music means making yourself sensitive in your pleasure to the whole work, to the plurality of its meaning, i.e. to the power of its abyss, its scent of catastrophe, its murmuring base notes, to the range of its rests, the charm of its melodies that reveal our interiority, to the double dimension of sacredness and transcendence, to its Life-affirming rhythm.
Through painting and literature, with a constant alternation of striking comparisons, a subtle simplicity of discourse and a wealth of thought that is neither hermetic nor pompous, Michel Ribon entices us to go for a vast stroll through the language of music and the arts.
For him, such are the riches and the truth of a work of music that, because it enchants our sensibility, stimulates our imagination and solicits reflection, it throws parcels of eternity into a recreated time. Mimicking the language of revelation, music, in its generosity, seems to bring us closer to Being. It invites us to refashion our being. Without music, Nietzsche wrote, life would be a mistake.