At the Marlboro Music School and Festival this summer, my fellow musicians and I spent an evening listening to historical recordings, an annual tradition. We ended with the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet (Op. 127), performed by the Busch Quartet, refugees from Hitler’s Germany.
This music is as profound as can be. From the first notes, I was in tears. Time was suspended, and nothing else existed. When it ended, I quietly left the room. Making polite conversation would have brought me back to earth; I wasn’t ready.
What I had experienced was complete immersion into music.
Most of life’s great moments are like this. We give our full attention to one thing, and marvel at its beauty and strangeness and specificity. Past disappointments and future worries evanesce, allowing us to take in the present in its totality.
But in today’s frenetic world, such moments are increasingly hard to come by. We should consider how rare and treasurable this kind of immersion is. […]
All sorts of people more qualified than I — sociologists, political scientists and media critics — have addressed the pernicious effects of social media and algorithmic marketing on our society and psyches. But I can testify that music is uniquely well positioned to provide an antidote to this avalanche of stimulus.
You may prefer literature or painting as art forms, but they do not have music’s magnificent, peculiar abstraction. Novels use words; even an abstract expressionist painter relies on colors and shapes that exist in nature and our lives. But instrumental music is not “about” anything. It stirs the emotions despite — or maybe because of — its inability to reference our lived experience in any literal way. A great performance of a great piece of music simultaneously takes us out of our heads and puts us in touch with our deepest, most inaccessible selves. That is the magic of music. […]
As I listened to this astonishing music in the Marlboro dining hall, I never opened my eyes. This was an instinct. I sensed an opportunity to be connected to something profound and beautiful and in no way ordinary, and I did not want to let my other senses intrude on the experience. In our splintered, combustible world, this immersion is the path of most resistance, and a gift beyond words.
— Jonathan Bliss, from “Too Many Dings and Beeps? Try Beethoven” (NY Times, Sept 28, 2025)
Mr. Biss is a concert pianist and co-artistic director of the Marlboro Music School and Festival
Portrait: OC87 Recovery Diaries. Photographer: Benjamin Ealovega
