Bonsai Pieces:
Music as Biography

In one of his many happy phrases Radhakamal Mukerjee describes art as: "the autobiography of a culture". I am tempted to say that a person’s musical horizon (what a human being remembers of the past, what music goes forgotten, what other music progressively enters the horizon) is that intimate biography that is hardly ever told. It may be true what Gabriel García Marquez says that “we live to tell the tale” (Vivir para contarla is the title of his autobiography). We are storytelling animals. But the story of how we progressively define ourselves in relation to others, the story of all the painful negotiations we go through to keep our balance in the process is often difficult one to tell; because it is not always experienced at a conscious level. Music may tell us tell us that part of our story we are not even fully aware of.