Abstract from this year's lecture
Music is a world parallel to the real world. This does not mean that it is unrelated or indifferent to the real world, but that the affects, sensations, emotions and thoughts that it arouses are provoked by forms that are inherent to it.
Igor Stravinsky proclaimed that music was powerless to express anything. I'm convinced that's not true. But I'm just as convinced that the reaction it provokes in us is not so much a question of what it is likely to evoke in us as of what intrinsically constitutes it. It's hard for me to say in a single sentence what music expresses, but I do know that what it conveys can be expressed in no other way: not by the visual arts, not by film or video, not by dance, not by computers, not by mathematics, not by philosophy, poetry, the novel, theater, nor by the sciences.
Music is made up of vibrations that, in turn, vibrate us, giving us sensations and emotions, provoking reflection and leaving imprints in our memory of the passage of time. These vibrations touch our senses in a way that no other art form can. This is no doubt why so many people have a purely sensitive or affective relationship with music. It is common for us to associate affects and emotions with listening to music, but these belong to highly personal and subjective registers, and there is no deep connection between them and the nature of these vibrations. The latter are the support for our emotions, but not their essence.