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"Where others speak of spirituality, I seek a more earthly transcendence." Charles William Vail

"I see science and mysticism as two complementary manifestations of the human mind; of its rational and intuitive faculties. The modern physicist experiences the world through an extreme specialization of the rational mind; the mystic through an extreme specialization of the intuitive mind. The two approaches are entirely different and involve far more than a certain view of the physical world. However, they are complementary, as we have learned to say in physics. Neither is comprehended in the other, nor can either of them be reduced to the other, but both of them are necessary, supplementing one another for a fuller understanding of the world. To paraphrase an old Chinese saying, mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both. Mystical experience is necessary to understand the deepest nature of things, and science is essential for modern life. What we need, therefore, is not a synthesis but a dynamic interplay between mystical intuition and scientific analysis." Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics

In the greatest of symphonies, form and substance are indivisible. Sibelius once spoke of musical ideas themselves determining form, and compared a symphony’s development to a river. The movement of the water determines the shape of the river bed, and in his analogy the river-water represents the flow of the musical ideas, and the river-bed that they form is the symphonic structure. Schoenberg put it differently but no less trenchantly: "form means that a piece of music is organized, that it consists of elements functioning like those of a living organism." At the same time it must convey the impression, as he puts it, that "the composer conceives an entire composition as a spontaneous vision." The two are not incompatible, for conception and realization are different process, but the impression made on the listener is that the composer has caught a glimpse of something that has been going on all the time in some other world that he has stretched out and captured. A letter Sibelius wrote in the autumn of 1914 puts it perfectly: "God opens his door for a movement, and his orchestra is playing the Fifth Symphony." Robert Layton, A Guide to the Symphony

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