"Music is the deepest of the arts and deep beneath all arts. So E. M. Forester wrote somewhere. If swimming suggested the idea of physical flight, then music suggested to me more. Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. [...] LSD reveals the what-ness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial costs of a drug and without the need to cry "Wow!" all the time, which is one of LSD's most distressing and least endearing side-effects.

[...] Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of the rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy "music-making" all that grain of human performance, so much messier than the artfully patinated pentimenti or self-conscious painterly mannerism of the sister arts, transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and to the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making."
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot