Music does not merely please, it works
Music does not merely please. It works. Just as we have long known that nature heals, that the mere sight of a forest lowers blood pressure and quiets the mind's alarm, we know that music reaches places words cannot. It carries memory, so that three notes can return an entire summer. It regulates the heart, literally, entraining pulse and breath. It consoles where argument is useless, and celebrates where speech is too slow.
"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life," said Auerbach, and everyone who has ended a hard day in front of honest loudspeakers knows the washing is real.
A home with music in it is a different home
A home with living music in it is measurably, palpably, a different home: calmer, warmer, more porous to feeling. This is why APANI treats music as it treats every gift of nature, as something far too precious to be diminished.
To reproduce it carelessly, compressed and coloured and robbed of its life, is in our eyes the same offence as serving a great wine in a paper cup. The music deserves better. The listener deserves better. And the evening, that fragile, unrepeatable gathering of particular people who will never be exactly this again, deserves the best there is.
