Music as a language (like all language) maintains this tension through its communal use and individuation. Its ready accessibility compared to other, more formally institutionalised [sic], languages such as literature, historiography and the visual arts, permits a ubiquitous and unexpected punctuation of the scripts we are expected to follow. Music, in its anonymous consumption and innumerable moments of articulation – from the desert ceremony and forest clearing to the bar, street corner, subway exit, and modern consecration in the recording studio – perhaps provides an altogether more extensive and irrepressible configuration of a language that sings time and being while recording memory. If music provides a home for nostalgia, it also offers a point of return for what becomes a new point of departure.

– Iain Chambers, in The Cinematic City (edited by David B. Clarke), p. 237.

Dr. Chambers, I don’t always understand what you write, but when it hits, it HITS.