Music
This has been coming up lately in my conversations and as we approach concert season I figure its appropriate to discuss the high and everlasting value of music.
Music has always played a lead role in my life, as it does for many if not most people I’m sure. I don’t work in the music industry, I can’t play any instruments andI don’t have a very good voice, but I love to listen. Music can transport you – to a favorite memory, to an idyllic future. It can comfort you, energize you, set the mood, inspire you. As such I would consider music my favorite art medium.
Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments. Man’s profound need of art lies in the fact that his cognitive faculty is conceptual, i.e., that he acquires knowledge by means of abstractions, and needs the power to bring his widest metaphysical abstractions into his immediate, perceptual awareness. Art fulfills this need: by means of a selective re-creation, it concretizes man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence. It tells man, in effect, which aspects of his experience are to be regarded as essential, significant, important.
— Ayn Rand, “Art and Cognition” The Romantic Manifesto, p. 45.
In that spirit I want to recognize some artists here.