The most profound piece of classical music is...?

[jochanaan]

...C.S. Lewis must have been an engaging writer, but as a thinker he is positively blithering, an unreconstructed entity monger. There's not a feeling in the world he wouldn't be willing to imagine an entity for, and having imagined it, why, there it is!...

Uh, lots of thinkers better than me or even you tend to disagree, and not all of them are Christians.  The difference in Lewis is that, as far as feelings of profundity or what he called "numinous" feelings (which as far as I can tell means feeling one is in touch with heaven, or at least with heavenly beings), he tends to think and feel that "where there's smoke, there's fire."

[Elgarian]

What's an unknown specific entity? It might be better to wipe the slate clean and ask what causes feelings of profundity. That would allow a real answer to emerge about why some music can evoke these feelings.

This is an evasion of the issue I was addressing, but it's more or less what I'd expect you to say.

The feelings are just as strong and maintain their value without the Platonism. You don't give up anything valuable

Well, you don't give up anything valuable, because your world view excludes the value that others (perhaps like me) are perceiving. But some of us, if we accepted your view of things, would be giving up almost all of what we value. Predictably, to you this looks like nothing. But it's a matter of perception, so not much can be done to bridge the gap.

C.S. Lewis must have been an engaging writer, but as a thinker he is positively blithering, an unreconstructed entity monger. There's not a feeling in the world he wouldn't be willing to imagine an entity for, and having imagined it, why, there it is!

I quoted a sentence that seemed (and still seems) an apposite illustration of the problem. It happened to be Lewis who'd said it, but it might as well have been anyone. What your, or my, opinion might be of him 'as a thinker' in general doesn't seem relevant here.*


To get back to the topic: the question of what is the most profound music surely depends on what we perceive as 'profound', and where we think the source of the profundity lies - which is the point I was (perhaps not very clearly) trying to make. So, for instance, one of my contenders for the most profound piece of music would be Elgar's The Spirit of England, because it illuminates, better than any other music I know, certain aspects of the human condition: the horror and anguish of loss and the need to express admiration and gratitude for sacrifice. But to someone else, perhaps directed by a love of 'absolute music' for instance, that choice would be almost incomprehensible, I think. Even ridiculous. For me, the most profound experiences seem usually to be directed to something outside the music, but are transmitted through it. I don't propose this as something to be universally advocated; it's just the way I find it.


*There's not much that you and I agree about, Ernie, but maybe here we're closer than usual. I remember reading somewhere a perceptive critique of Lewis's apologetic writing that said something like: 'We may feel as if we're being presented with an argument, but actually we're being offered a vision'. I think that's pretty close.

[karlhenning]

Debussy's The Sea, of course. It can reach 11.000 metres.

He didn't write about those bits 

[greg]

"October"? nah......

Read this and was confused, but remembered this is Shosty's op.132...

[imperfection]

I thought they had a vote in the UN not long ago and the 1812 overture beat everything mentioned in this thread in a landslide victory.