"Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it
derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The
note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies,
ragas, Chinese operas, jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that
we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the
poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand, from which we
can build our cathedrals of sound, is as alchemical a mystery as
mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe
we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don’t have much of it. Our
lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways
deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that
is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we
were worthy of the world."-Salman Rushdie:The Ground Beneath Her Feet"One Life Isn't Enough"
