Advice from a musician...

Tomorrow I shall bring my cello to my 101 class and then two more members of my quartet will come to my afternoon class to play some Beethoven. I will try to pump out Prelude to the Bach Suites for solo cello for my 101 students who couldn't be less interested; maybe if they can feel the sensation of the instrument in their own hands, against their own bodies might they understand the inordinately physical sensation of making sound from such a sensuously shaped and textured instrument.

Here's Mathieu on the difference between music and language:
"Music is entirely specific: what you hear is what you get. Language is rich and various and inexact. You have to keep saying what is, a thousand ways, until someone jumps" (33). And then he goes further by saying, "The challenge for both listener and reader is to willfully seek balance between sound and sense, to sedulously insist on mind in music and euphony in language" (35).