Many musical compositions contain the form of a closed sound cycle, a ring, a spiral, sometimes three-dimensional, a spinning vortex, a tornado …

I wrote not so long ago about the third movement of Beethoven’s seventeenth sonata, where I thought I heard swirls of air, squally eddies over a swirling sea, and moreover, in the last quarter, I heard eddies rotating in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION. It’s like two tornadoes with an opposite spin colliding.

And so, this morning, while washing dishes, the melody of “Morgengrauen” – “Dawn” from Grieg’s symphonic suite to Ibsen’s «Peer Gynt» suddenly “spun” in my head. And musically and visually, it seemed to me, again, from the music, that the Sun (in Grieg’s interpretation) does not rise slowly and confidently at the rate of the Earth’s rotation, above the horizon, but CLIMBS up some unknown ledges, sliding down a little every minute, but in general, despite these “stumbles”, moves nevertheless with a tendency towards zenith.

And then the next thought flashed across, whether such cyclical musical movements are not similar to the work of Sisyphus, who rolls a stone up a mountain or hill, and at the last moment it invariably ROLLS down.

Musically, Grieg’s dawn does NOT turn into sunset, and his theme becomes dominant in the fortissimo of the entire orchestra.

Then the morning chirping of birds, it certainly wasn’t the stone of Sisyphus, thundering down.

The wonderful dancer Mahmud Esambayev, in the Indian “Dance of the Golden God”, shows us an example of extraordinary physical endurance, (also depicting dawn), where he incredibly slowly and STEADILY, without the slightest tremor, gets up from a squatting position to a full-length straighten!

And here there are no even the smallest descents or slips, but, like the Sun, a steady, firm and consistent ascent up on the perfectly smooth surface of the celestial sphere!

The Sun deity CANNOT stumble or slip in his eternal movement!

Amazing, extraordinary!

Then I thought about Bach-Gounod’s “Ave Maria.” There is also a melody slightly similar to Grieg in terms of cycles, and also a melodic step spiral rising higher and higher to the sky. And in the end, there is also a spiral descent to the sinful earth.

Surely there are cases in which you can just hear this rolling of a stone up a mountain, and then a rumbling collapse of it down. But at the moment I couldn’t remember any musical analogue of this “parable of the tongue”.

30 X 2025