“I am a very emotional person, and music was the thing that always made it gush out. Music has a particular access to one’s emotional self that is at a far deeper level than any other art form. Eliot said it was the deepest of the arts and deep beneath the arts, and that seems to be true. I suppose it’s because it’s abstract, it’s not about anything, so it’s not mediated or palliated by the dirt of actual reference. A word is more or less a token - poets are always struggling with the words they’re having to use. I think it was Rilke who said that ‘language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin’. Musicians don’t have to do that: they don’t have to use language, the diminished currency of everyone. Because music isn’t about anything, it can be about everything.” — (x)