“Dear Zibby, I can’t thank you enough for introducing me to this music. Beyond just genuinely loving it, I feel it’s quietly altering my feeling about New York City, with which I’ve always had a slightly conflicted relationship. I’ve found that if you replace the horns and the shouting with, say, Schubert or Telemann, the city becomes unbearably beautiful. After years of thinly disguised rage on both our parts, it’s like the music has mediated a truce between us. Some early favorites. Massenet’s Meditation. If a more beautiful piece of music has ever been composed, I don’t know it. That Brandenburg concerto is no joke, and I echo your sentiment regarding Beethoven. Whoa. I have no idea what the Vivaldi piece from Giustino is actually about, but to me, it suggests deception, some kind of elegant double-crossing. It makes me feel like I’m a double agent knee deep in some kind of sexy espionage.
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Grace, I realized, is neither time-nor place-dependent. All we need is the right soundtrack. I suppose this new infusion of music in my life is, at the very least, making me reconsider my hostility to dead, white males.”
Some threads of magic you never want to move on from, Liberal Arts.
Sonia Singh 