We all listen to music according to our separate , for the sake of analysis, the whole listening process may become clearer if we break it up into its component parts, so to certain sense we all listen to music on three separate lack of a better terminology, one might name these: 1) the sensuous plane, 2) the expressive plane, 3) the sheerly musical only advantage to be gained from mechanically splitting up the listening process into these hypothetical planes is the clearer view to be had of the way in which we listen.The simplest way of listening to music is to listen for the sheer pleasure of the musical sound is the sensuous is the plane on which we hear music without thinking, without considering it in any turns on the radio while doing something else andabsent-mindedly bathes in the kind of brainless but attractive state of mind is engendered by the mere sound appeal of the music.The surprising thing is that many people who consider themselves qualified music lovers abuse that plane in go to concerts in order to lose use music as a consolation or an enter an ideal world where one doesn’t have to think of the realities of everyday course they aren’t thinking about the music allows them to leave it, and they go off to a place to dream, dreaming because of and apropos of the music yet never quite listening to it.Yes, the sound appeal of music is a potent and primitive force, but you must not allow it to usurp a disproportionate share of your sensuous plane is an important one in music, a very important one, but it does not constitute the whole story.The second plane on which music exists is what I have called the expressive , immediately, we tread on controversial have a way of shying away from any discussion of music’s expressive not Stravinsky himself proclaim that his music was an “object”, a “thing”, with a life of its own, and with no other meaning than its own purely musical existenceThis intransigent attitude of Stravinsky’s may be due to the fact that so many people have tried to read different meanings into so many knows it is difficult enough to say precisely what it is that a piece of music means, to say it definitely to say it finally so that everyone is satisfied with your that should not lead one to the other extreme of denying to music the right to be “expressive”.Listen, if you can,to the 48 fugue themes of Bach’s Well-tempered to each theme, one after will soon realize that each theme mirrors a different world of will also soon realize that the more beautiful a theme seems to you the harder it is to find any word that will describe it to your complete , you will certainly know whether it is a gay theme or a sad will be able, on other words, in your own mind, to draw a frame of emotional feeling around your study the sad one a little closer.Try to pin down the exact quality of its it pessimistically sad or resignedly sad; is it fatefully sad or smilingly sadLet us suppose that you are fortunate and can describe to your own satisfaction in so many words the exact meaning of your chosen is still no guarantee that anyone else will be need they important thing is that each one feels for himself the specific expressive quality of a theme or, similarly, an entire piece of if it is a great work of art, don’t expect it to mean exactly the same thing to you each time you return to it.The third plane on which music exists is the sheerly musical the pleasurable sound of music and the expressive feeling that it gives off, music does exist in terms of the notes themselves and of their listeners are not sufficiently conscious of this third plane.It is very important for all of us to become more alive to music on its sheerly musical all, an actual musical material is being intelligent listener must be prepared to increase his awareness of the musical material and what happens to must hear the melodies, the rhythms, the harmonies, the tone colors in a more conscious above all he must, in order to follow the line of the composer’s thought, know something of the principles of musical to all of these elements is listening to the sheerly musical plane.Let me repeat that I have split up mechanically the three separate planes on which we listen merely for the sake of greater clarity. Actually, we never listen on one or the other of these we do is to correlate them—listening in all three ways at the same takes no mental effort, for we do it instinctivelyPerhaps an analogy with what happens to us when we visit the theater will make this instinctive correlation the theater, you are aware of the actors and actresses, costumes and sets, sounds and these give one the sense that the theater is a pleasant place to be constitute the sensuous plane in our theatrical reactions.The expressive plane in the theater would be derived from the feeling that you get from what is happening on the are moved to pity, excitement, or is this general feeling, generated aside from the particular words being spoken, a certain emotional something which exists on the stage,that isanalogous to the expressive quality in music.The plot and plot development is equivalent to our sheerly musical playwright creates and develops a character in just the same way that a composer creates and develops a to the degree of your awareness of the way in which the artist in either field handles his material will you become a more intelligent is easy enough to see that the theatergoer never is conscious of any of these elements is aware of them all at the same same is true of music simultaneously and without thinking listen on all three planes.It is not surprising that modern children tend to look blank and dispirited when info rmed that they will someday have to “go to work andmake a living”. The problem is that they cannot visualize what work is in corporate Americ a.Not so long ago, when a parent said he was off to work, the child knew very well what was about to happen. His parent was going to make something or fix something. The parent could take his offspring to his place of business and let him watch while he repai red a buggy or built a table.When a child asked, “What kind of work do you do, Daddy” his father could answer in terms that a child could come to grips with, such as “I fix steam engines” or “I make hor se collars.Well, a few fathers still fix steam engines and build tables, but most do not. Nowad ays, most fathers sit in glass buildings doing things that are absolutely incomprehensible t o children. The answers they give when asked, “What kind of work do you do, Daddy” are likely to be utterlymystifying to a child.”I sell space””I do market research.”,”I am a data processor.””I am in public relation s.””I am a systems analyst” Suchexplanations must seem nonsense to a child. How can he possibly envision anyone analyzi ng a system or researching a marketEven grown men who do market research have trouble visualizing what a public rel ations man does with his day, and it is a safe bet that the average systems analyst is as baf fled about what a space salesman does at the shop as the average space salesman is about the tools needed to analyze a system.In the common everyday job, nothing is made any more. Things are now made by machines. Very little is repaired. The machines that makethings make them in such a fashion that they will quickly fall apart in such a way that repai rs will be prohibitively expensive. Thus the buyer isencouraged to throw the thing away and buy a new one. In effect, the machines are makin g handful of people remotely associated withthese machines can, of course, tell their inquisitive children “Daddy makes junk”. Most of t he workforce, however, is too remote from junkproduction to sense any contribution to the industry. What do these people do Consider the typical 12-story glass building in the typical American city. Nothing is b eing made in this building and nothing is being repaired, including the building itself. Cons tructed as a piece of junk, the building will be discarded when it wears out, and another pi ece of junk will be set in its place.Still, the building is filled with people who think of themselves as working. At any given moment during the day perhaps one-third of them will be talking into telephones. Most of these conversations will be about paper, for paper is what occupies nearly every one in this building. Somejobs in the building require men to fill paper with words. There are persons who type ne atly on paper and persons who read paper and jot notes in the margins. Some persons m ake copies of paper and other persons deliver paper. There are persons who file paper a nd persons who unfile paper.Some persons mail paper. Some persons telephone other persons and ask that pa per be sent to them. Others telephone to ascertain thewhereabouts of paper. Some persons confer about paper. In the grandest offices, men a pprove of some paper and disapprove of other paper.The elevators are filled throughout the day with young men carrying paper from fl oor to floor and with vital men carrying paper to bediscussed with other vital men.What is a child to make of all this His father may be so eminent that he lunches wi th other men about paper. Suppose he brings his son towork to give the boy some idea of what work is all about. What does the boy see happ eningHis father calls for paper. He reads paper. Perhaps he scowls at paper. Perhaps he makes an angry red mark on paper. He telephones another man and says they had bette r lunch over paper.At lunch they talk about paper. Back at the office, the father orders the paper rety ped and reproduced in quintuplicate, and then sent toanother man for comparison with paper that was reproduced in triplicate last year.Imagine his poor son afterwards mulling over the mysteries of work with a friend, who asks him, ”What’s your father do” What can the boy reply “It beats me,” perhaps, if he is not very observant. Or if he is, “Something that has to do with making junk, I think . Same as everybodyelse.”It was snowing heavily, and although every true New Yorker looks forward to a white Christmas, the shoppers on Fifth Avenue were in a hurry, not just to track down the last-minute presents, but to escape the bitter cold and get home with their families for Christmas Eve.Josh Lester turned into 46th Street. He was not yet enjoying the Christmas spirit, because he was still at work, albeit a working dinner at Joanne's. Josh was black, in his early thirties, and an agreeable-looking person, dressed smartly but not expensively. He was from a hard-working family in upstate Virginia, and was probably happiest back home in his parents' house. But his demeanor concealed a Harvard law degree and an internship in DC with a congressman, a junior partnership in a New York law firm, along with a razor-sharp intellect and an ability to think on his feet. Josh was very smart.The appointment meant Josh wouldn't get home until after Christmas. He was not, however, unhappy. He was meeting Jo Rogers, the senior senator for Connecticut, and one of the best-known faces in the US. Senator Rogers was a Democrat in her third term of office, who knew Capitol Hill inside out but who had nevertheless managed to keep her credibility with her voters as a Washington outsider. She was pro-abortion,anti-corruption, pro-low carbon emissions and anti-capital punishment, as fine a progressive liberal as you could find this side of the Atlantic. Talk show hosts called her Honest Senator Jo, and a couple of years ago, Time magazine had her in the running for Woman of the Year. It was election time in the following year, and the word was she was going to run for the Democratic nomination. Rogers had met Josh in DC, thought him highly competent, and had invited him to dinner.Josh shivered as he checked the address on the slip of paper in his hand. He'd never been to Joanne's, but knew it by reputation, not because of its food, which had often been maligned, or its jazz orchestra, which had a guest slot for a well-known movie director who played trumpet, but because of the stellar quality of its sophisticated guests: politicians, diplomats, movie actors, hall-of-fame athletes, journalists, writers, rock stars and Nobel Prize winners – in short, anyone who was anyone in this city of power brokers.Josh told him, and although the waiter refrained from curling his lip, he managed to show both disdain and effortless superiority with a simple flaring of his nostrils.“Yes, Senator, please come this way,” and as Senator Rogers passed through the crowded room, heads turned as the diners recognized her and greeted her with silent applause. In a classless society, Rogers was the closest thing to aristocracy that America had. Alberto hovered for a moment, then went to speak to a colleague.After two hours, Rogers and Josh got up to leave. There was a further flurry of attention by the staff, including an offer by Alberto to waive payment of the bill, which Rogers refused. As they were putting on their coats, Rogers said, “Thank you, Alberto. Oh, have I introduced you to my companion, Josh Lester”A look of panic, followed by one of desperate optimism flashed across Alberto's face.“Ah, not yet, no, ... not properly, ” he said weakly.“Josh Lester. This is the latest recruit to my election campaign. He's going to be my new deputy campaign manager, in charge of raising donations. And if we get that Republican out of the White House next year, you've just met my Chief of Staff.”It came as if from nowhere.There were about two dozen of us by the bank of elevators on the 35th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. We were firefighters, mostly, and we were in various stages of exhaustion. Some guys were sweating like pigs. Some had their turnout coats off, or tied around their waists. Quite a few were breathing heavily. Others were raring to go. All of us were taking a beat to catch our breaths, and our bearings, figure out what the hell was going on. We'd been at this thing, hard, for almost an hour, somea little bit less, and we were nowhere close to done. Of course, we had no idea what there was left to do, but we hadn't made a dent.And then the noise started, and the building began to tremble, and we all froze. Dead solid still. Whatever there had been left to do would now have to wait. For what, we had no idea, but it would wait. Or, it wouldn't, but that wasn't the point. The point was that no one was moving. To a man, no one moved, except to lift his eyes to the ceiling, to see where the racket was coming from. As if we could see clear through the ceiling tiles for an easy answer. No one spoke. There wasn't time to turn thought into words, even though there was time to think. For me anyway, there was time to think, too much time to think, and my thoughts were all over the place. Every possible worst-case scenario, and a few more besides. The building was shaking like in an earthquake, like an amusement park thrill ride gone berserk, but it was the rumble that struck me still with fear. The sheer volume of it. The way it coursed right through me. I couldn't think what the hell would make a noise like that. Like a thousand runaway trains speeding towards me. Like a herd of wild beasts. Like the thunder of a rockslide. Hard to put it into words, but whatever the hell it was it was gaining speed, and gathering force, and getting closer, and I was stuck in the middle, unable to get out of its path.It's amazing, the kind of thing you think about when there should be no time to think. I thought about my wife and my kids, but only fleetingly and not in any kind oflife-flashing-before-my-eyes sort of way. I thought about the job, how close I was to making deputy. I thought about the bagels I had left on the kitchen counter back at the firehouse. I thought how we firemen were always saying to each other, "I'll see you at the big one." Or, "We'll all meet at the big one." I never knew how it started, or when I'd picked up on it myself, but it was part of our , no matter how big this fire is, there'll be another one bigger, somewhere down the road. We'll make it through this one, and we'll make it through that one, too. I always said it, at big fires, and I always heard it back, and here I was, thinking I would never say or hear these words again, because there would never be another fire as big as this. This was the big one we had all talked about, all our lives, and if I hadn't known this before – just before these chilling moments – this sick, black noise now confirmed it.I fumbled for some fix on the situation, thinking maybe if I understood what was happening I could steel myself against it. All of these thoughts were landing in my brain in a kind of flashpoint, one on top of the other and all at once, but there they were. And each thought landed fully formed, as if there might be time to act on each, when in truth there was no time at all.Richard Picciotto (also known as Pitch) was in the north tower of the World Trade Center when it collapsed in theaftermath of the massive terrorist attack on 11 September 2001. A battalion commander for the New York Fire Department, he was on the scene of the disaster within minutes of the attack, to lead seven companies of firefighters into the tower to help people trapped and to extinguish fires blazing everywhere.The north tower was the first of the twin towers to be hit. It was followed 17 minutes later by the south tower. The south tower, however, was the first to collapse, at 9:59 am. At that moment, Picciotto was in the north tower, racing upwards by the stairs because the elevators were out of action. He then gave the order to evacuate. On the 12th story he came across 50 people amid the debris, too badly hurt or frightened to move. Picciotto and his men helped them down. When he reached the seventh floor, the tower fell, and he was buried beneath thousands of tons of rubble. He eventually came round four hours later, leading his men to safety.Picciotto was the highest ranking firefighter to survive the attack. The chief of the department, the first deputy and the chief of rescue operations had all been killed. Altogether the death toll included 343 firefighters and more than 3,000 civilians.Toast always lands butter side down. It always rains on bank holidays. You never win the lottery, but other people you know seem to ... Do you ever get the impression that you were born unlucky Even the most rational person can be convinced at times that there is a force out there making mishaps occur at the worst possible time. We all like to believe that Murphy's Law is true。