more emotional energy

here are some thoughts by the composer roger sessions and the poet robert bly.  i'm a great believer in this notion of a pre-conscious emotional channel in us all.  music and poetry both try to evoke the "emotional energy" that lives there.

"What the music does is animate the emotion; the music, in other words, develops and moves on a level that is essentially below the level of conscious emotion.  Its realm is that of emotional energy rather than that of emotion in the specific sense."
 —  Roger Sessions, The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener, Princeton University Press, 1971, pp. 24

"And what are notes?  When sounds are absorbed and shaped by and inside, say, a string quartet, they contain almost no life stuff.  Notes are pure sound vibrations connected apparently to feelings (but not to experiences) that resonate somewhere inside us.  During the Well-Tempered Clavichord we feel 'feelings' that we seem not to have felt in daily life.  There is evidently a layer of consciousness that runs alongside our life, above or below, but is not it.  Perhaps it is older.  Certain works of art make it their aim to rise up and pierce this layer, or layers.  Or they open to allow 'memories' from this layer in."
— Robert Bly, TruthBarriers: poems by Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Robert Bly, Sierra Club Books, 1980, from the introduction, pp. 9