I have always admired Phillip. Phillip has perfect pitch and near total recall. The breadth and depth of both his command of facts and his understanding of them are astounding. He is at once urbane, erudite, and theoretically sophisticated. These characteristics are more astounding than admirable. What I find admirable in Phillip is something so rare as to be non-existent among us mere mortals. He can perceive the absolute aesthetic.

As far as I can tell, his aesthetic sense extends to all areas of life - art, literature, dance, culinary, as well as music. To him, music is not just organized sounds, nor sounds to dance or eat to. He will let his judgment stand against the collective tastes of society - any society. Yes, according to Phillip, 10,000 flies can be wrong. Music has meaning. This meaning transcends words, whether explicit or implied.

This is the soul of composition. At times only he can sense this musical life force. Hedonists, numerologists, and secular musicologists (and all pagans who) cannot discern this spirit. Theses savages seek to understand musical expression. They look for the sounds to create meaning. The ingredients for the soul are to be found somewhere among the seven elements: melody, rhythm, harmony, timbre, dynamics, tempo, and form.

Phillip knows that spirit is not to be found in the music. Music is the aural manifestation of spirit. Spirit precedes the music. Great music is the expression of that spirit. From whence does the spirit flow? Melody.

Melody is a series of single pitches perceived as a unified whole. Without that unity you have random, meaningless sounds. Memorable melodies are found plentifully in Italian Operas. The bel canto ideal sought beautiful melodies; beautiful sung melodies. Phillip worships the music of Donizetti, Bellini, Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini.

Plato had speculated that music arose from heightened speech. The roots of opera are planted firmly in this ideal - melody to heighten and enhance the meaning of the text. Indeed, most opera would be banal without the music. Wagner's claims to the contrary, the libretto can rarely stand alone as a play.

If melody is the meta-soul of meaning, what then can stand in its way? The mind. What about the body or the community? I say mind only because of his reactions. He looks down with disdain or amusement at purely hedonistic popular music or simple peasant folk songs. Music by Schoenberg could make him genuinely ill. The world of numbered rows has no currency in the expressive heart.

It is not just the mechanical he finds meaningless; Bach is an empty tomb. Bach was the master of the baroque fugue. Phillip concurs with the ancients that trying to listen to more than one melody at the same time is like trying to listen to two conversations at once; neither makes sense. The music is lobotomized by the intellectual intricacies endemic to the fugue.

I am indeed envious. I have spent many unsuccessful years seeking this abstract, yet absolute ideal in music. Perhaps it takes a special gift to see through the mist of heuristics, hormones, and hearth. The absolute aesthetic must reside out there with Plato's Forms, Kant's Categorical Imperative, and Schopenhauer's Absolute Will. Only a genius such as Phillip can glimpse its reality.