J. S. Kuiken

I’m doing research for my novel on the history of music and I found this quote via Wikipedia (I know, Wikipedia bad, blah blah). I’m quite taken with this quote so I’d thought I’d stick it here in order to save it.

But that music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by the few, and that it alone among all language unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable—these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods and make music itself the supreme mystery of human knowledge.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked