This is Benjamin Zander’s 2008 TED talk on music and passion. It was one of the free TV offerings on my Virgin America flight to San Francisco yesterday (let us pause for a moment to reflect on how cool that is, that an airline can provide such a range of videos, from some crap CBS show that I’d need to pay $1.99 to watch to these insightful lectures for free).
I strongly encourage all of you to take 20 minutes and watch this, because it’s absolutely brilliant. One of my favorite things is listening to people describe music — not just talk about which songs or composers they like, but explain how individual notes sound, use metaphors to talk about lines of music, create narratives for them. This fascinates me. I could listen to Benjamin Zander talk for hours, especially when he says things like this:
The job of the C is to make the B sad.
I guarantee that if you haven’t previously seen this, it will be the best thing you watch today.
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