Introduction and Exposition

So there I was, inoffensively letting the Ryedale Festival committee meeting carry on before my lazy gaze, when unbidden from my lips I heard 'We should have a blog. Why don't we have a blog?'  Eyes down, I got on with pencilling in the noughts in the set of Johnny Minford's festival accounts, but gradually became aware that the talking had stopped.  And as I glanced up, I heard Robin Andrews: 'Thanks Michael. Ann, can you make a note of that please - Michael's going to write us a  blog.'

As others before me have discovered, Robin is a man who gets things done. In this case, me. So welcome to Ryedale Festival Counterpoint.  

I'm not sure how our great musicians would have regarded this development.  As Gustav Mahler pointed out: 'If a composer could say what he had to say in words, he wouldn't bother trying to say it in music.'   Beethoven was  probably agreeing when he said:  'Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend'. (A bit late quartets, that?). And there's not much help from Stravinsky either: 'I haven't understood a bar of music in my life. But I've felt it.'

Perhaps music-loving writers could be more help?  It depends. 'When words leave off, music begin' says  Heine. Thanks for that helpful advice, Heinrich. And it gets worse: 'Hell is full of musical amateurs' says George Bernard Shaw. Actually, that's got to be wrong, don't you think? Did GBS never sing in a choir? Did he never pick up a fiddle and scratch out a carol at Christmas?  

Thank God for the French, or at least for Victor Hugo. He's my man, and what he said deserves the quote-box treatment, for it is this blog's manifesto:

"Music expresses that which cannot be said, and on which it is impossible to be silent."