If you’ve been to London’s Victoria & Albert museum, you’ve surely seen the huge green-and-blue glass chandelier in the main lobby. It is a wonderfully contradictory piece of art – it probably weighs a few tonnes, yet it looks light and slender and snaky. I’ve been fascinated by it ever since I first saw it, and admire it every time I visit the museum.

The creator of the chandelier is Dale Chihuly, and Kew Gardens is currently hosting a whole exhibition by him, called Gardens of Glass.

A few large outdoor pieces were immediately visible as I walked in through Victoria Gate – two bright bundles of snakes (like the V&A chandelier) at the entrance of the tropical greenhouse, and floating colourful bubbles in the pond.

But most of Chihuly’s installations were scattered throughout the greenhouses, which turned out to be an eminently suitable setting for them. One of the advantages of this arrangement was that the installations were unpredictable. In a gallery, you always know that there will be more art around the next corner. Here, art had to be discovered, and often took me by surprise: lilac rods of glass between agaves in the desert; wobbly yellow plates in a carp pond; a mass of huge patterned balls arranged like a string of balloons rising towards the greenhouse roof, and my favourite – a chandelier of red and yellow plates.

I’ve always wondered how the V&A chandelier was constructed. It obviously couldn’t have been transported there as it is. You couldn’t even lay it flat without crushing half of it. Today I finally found out, from a documentary showing Chihuly at work.

In effect, the chandeliers are constructed on giant bottle drying racks. Inside, there is a metal core. The core is sparsely covered with hundreds of metal spikes – one for each piece. The glass pieces are then stuck on those spikes, and a wire tied around the neck of each piece attaches it to the core.

Assembling a chandelier requires a team of several people, and takes a few days. And because they are reassembled every time, they will always come out slightly different, and evolve over time. The Sun, for example, started out entirely monochrome yellow, yet has now acquired dashes of bright red and blue.

When I’m listening to music – especially live in concert – and close my eyes, the quality of listening changes.

Music becomes immediate and intimate.
With my eyes open, I am an observer. With my eyes closed, I am immersed in the music and filled with it. It becomes closer, intensified, more real. It is like opening a door and letting the music in, instead of viewing it through a window. When my eyes are open, I see the musicians on the stage, and there is a distance between us. I close my eyes, and space and distance disappear. Music fills the space that used to be there. Instead of being in front of me on the stage, it is around me.

But at the same time, it is like closing a door, and closing out everything that is not the music – like darkening a room to make a movie projected on the wall stand out better. Music becomes purified and distilled. The material aspect is removed; music is no longer the result of instruments manipulated by human hands, but pure sound. I no longer hear individual instruments, and even the distinction between the vocal and instrumental components becomes blurred.

It is a timeless state of consciousness and joy, very much like meditation or sex. In fact it is like meditating with music, and puts the mind in a similar state of relaxed focus. Everything external and irrelevant goes away. Rational thought is suppressed; the music bypasses reason and goes straight to the soul. Time disappears. I could not tell you afterwards how long it took or how many songs I heard. Sometimes I cannot even remember the melody.

I only learned today that there is a word for this state of mind in the Indian raga tradition. It is called rasavadhana. (*)

This doesn’t work with all music, of course. It needs to be melodious and not too sharp, and even, as anything too sudden will break the spell. Some Indian music works very well, which isn’t surprising given their focus on this. Minimalist music like Philip Glass or Steve Reich has also worked well, as has jazz such as EST.

And this state is not always desirable, either. Sometimes I want to enjoy the human element – see how the musicians enjoy what they are doing, and see their virtuosity in action. Or to remember the melody and be able to appreciate the music from an intellectual perspective as well.


(*) I heard a concert today – Kronos Quartet and Asha Bhosle.

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The walls are up but still unpainted, and building work is going on all around. Nevertheless, I want to get started straight away, because if I wait until the construction is all finished then I probably wouldn’t get to post before Christmas.

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