I want to begin with four quotations, fairly typical of their type, and germane to our topic because they encapsulate what many artists and art lovers feel about art and music. These feelings are often inchoate, to be sure, and in the cold light of analytical day they may look extravagant and exaggerated. But they do capture something of the experience people often have of art and beauty, and for that reason alone must be given some phenomenological plausibility at least.

First quotation: ‘It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion, inasmuch as the mythical images which religion would wish to be believed as true are apprehended in art for their symbolic value, and through ideal representation of those symbols art reveals the concealed deep truth within them.’

Second quotation: ‘(In art) for a brief moment we really become the primal essence itself, and feel its unbounded lust for existence, and delight in existence. Now we see the struggles, the torment, the destruction of phenomena as necessary. For all our pity and terror we are happy to be alive, not as individuals but as the single living thing, merged with its creative delight…’