It is diabolically hard to write about music. You grab overwrought and inexact metaphors taken from religion or from nature. (Heaven, hell, mountains, waterfalls, etc.) I don't like that, unless God is explicitly mentioned or unless it's something like Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. Or, you can resort to musical jargon about descending sevenths and transition sections and key changes, and so forth. Which can work if you can do it, but on the whole I can't. Or, which is what I prefer, you focus on banalities, about which you can at least be more precise, like what the CD cost or how nice the lady playing it looked in her pretty dress.

In the latest (October 2004) issue of the BBC Music Magazine, however, there is to be found a paragraph which manages to be exact about the nature of music, and about its power to move, and quite profound at the same time, or so I think. Religion is alluded to, but not in any way that compromises on precision. On the contrary, the religion thing is cleaned up and clarified, I think.

It is from an article by Jessica Duchen. The article itself is not, I believe, on line and linkable to, although Duchen now has a classical music blog. Duchen's article, entitled "Musician, heal thyself", is about why music – classical music especially – consoles and comforts the people whom it consoles and comforts. Duchen herself says that she was much consoled by listening to Bach when her mother was dying, and by playing Janacek on the piano when her father died. But she also spoke to many others whom music had also comforted.

Why does music have such power to support during the most demanding times of our lives? Why does it carry us through when nothing else can? …

Among those Duchen spoke with was a certain Richard Bittleston, "an organist and special minister for music in the Unitarian Church who has also worked in music therapy".

'… I once played a Schubert impromptu at the funeral of a musician,' he says. 'It had been his favourite piece and its impact was highly charged, both negatively and positively. The positive charge was the fact that here was something that was still alive. The music communicated an idea about eternity that we would never be able to put into words. It made a particular impact on the musician's wife, who wept profusely. …'

Yes, but why does it do this? Now we get to the bit that I really like.

'The ultimate power of music,' continues Bittleston, 'is that it temporarily demands you to exist in the present. There are no problems in the present! The performing arts are unlike other art forms, which are tied up with anything but the present. In music you can literally leave your problems behind, because they're not there. That would be a very Zen Buddhist way of looking at what music is. In Christianity it was once argued that music transports one through the gates of heaven. But what they were really saying is the same thing - it transports one not through the gates of heaven, but slap-bang into the place where you actually are, which is the now. That process dissolves all problems, at least for a time. I think this might be defined as heaven in some circles.'

Now. That doesn't say everything about music for me, because in addition to its now-ness, there is also the way it progresses (especially Western classical music), the way it brings the immediate past into now and sets up an immediate expected future now. So now is not all that is going on. But to get all this past and future stuff you do have to concentrate on that nowness, or you lose it.