Lehigh University
Lehigh University Keeping Going with Music As in high school, and at RPI, what held me together, what kept me going, was music. “With- out music, life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche said, although I didn’t come across those words of his until many years later. When I see the young losers on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley listening to their rap and rock ’n roll, or strumming away at their out-of-tune guitars, I know that they, too, are keeping going with music. On cold, empty, fall and winter days, when things became truly unbearable, I would go to the music room in Grace Hall, and listen to LPs through headphones. The room had soft chairs, couches, and was seldom occupied by more than two or three other students. I could listen to the records I couldn’t afford to buy. I listened to Renaissance music, any music that was not of the wretched time I was living in. I listened to an album containing the music of Giles Farnaby, an early 17th-century English composer. I thought that his “A Toye” was in its way a perfect compo- sition. And a work with a haunting, descending harp part that expressed an evening in another world — I have never been able to find the title or the composer, though I will recognize the music immediately when I next hear it. And Bach’s Capriccio on the Departure of His Beloved Brother, composed in Bach’s teens. I liked the sadness, the farewell in it. And Thomas Tallis’ Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet1 [“Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo...” (“How the city doth sit solitary, that was full of people!”)].
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