Art & Creativity Quote by Charles Munch

Munch isn’t selling mysticism as a party trick; he’s defending a working musician’s truth: that the most important parts of musical experience don’t translate cleanly into language, analytics, or even conscious thought. Coming from a conductor who made his name in the French orchestral tradition - all color, contour, atmosphere - the line reads like a quiet rebuttal to two pressures that never stop chasing music: the critic’s demand for verbal explanation and the modern institution’s urge to quantify artistry.

The phrasing does a lot of strategic lifting. “Inexpressible” isn’t a romantic shrug, it’s a boundary marker: music has access to something the rest of culture keeps trying to domesticate. When he says it “rises far above what words can mean or the intelligence define,” he’s not anti-intellectual so much as anti-reduction. Munch is insisting that meaning in music isn’t a neat payload you can paraphrase; it’s felt as motion, tension, release, timbre - as the body registering patterns before the mind produces an interpretation.

Then comes the real tell: “the unconscious.” In mid-20th-century Europe, you can hear the lingering authority of Freud and the broader fascination with interior life. Munch positions music as a direct line to that “imponderable and impalpable” zone - not as therapy, but as a language of instinct. Subtext: if you judge music only by what you can explain, you’ll miss the point and, worse, you’ll mistake your explanation for the experience.