ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the digression on folk music from which interpolated into a much longer investigation into precisely the question of what happens to ideas in music and with Albert plays, Sand interrupts her narrative with those three pages of embroidery on the subject of folk music in which she combines a cheerfully straightforward surface sense with the most darkly problematic of implications, should one care to reflect on them. The examples of musical meaning which author have examined, be they translations of raindrops or of cathedrals, are all of what Sand calls external objects. At the end of the passage from Consuelo, she introduces a new point of departure for such meaning: ideas, or beliefs; the thought of the peoples who built cathedrals. Sand is certainly sensitive to the differences between folk music, art music, and religious music; nonetheless, in each genre, in every kind of music, people find the same duality.
