The Sirens, first mentioned in Homer, attracted passing sailors not only by their songs of indescribable beauty, but above all by their ability to know and reveal everything that happens on earth. Like the beauty of that seductive song, human music, in its many forms, awakens a longing for sound, perhaps for implied content and form, as well as for that which can no longer be communicated by words and yet touches us existentially.

A different, perhaps newer kind of beauty is revealed in the ...