PERILOUS MUSIC

    When the music of Abhogie is heard for the first time, it does not
    usually impress. The individual tones and sonours may seem vibrant,
    piercing or haunting, but the musical connoisseur listens in vain
    for the qualities that may be discerned in other musics. For a few,
    unbidden images will arise - birds wheeling against sublimating clouds,
    danger sensed beyond the skyline, gardens in abandoned palaces
    waiting presciently - but these are misleading. It is better to count
    them as warnings from the subconscious.

    When the music of Abhogie is heard for the second time (if warnings
    go unheeded) it generally pleases. Rhythms, moods, surprises, conjunctions
    and resolutions, unperceived the first time, are now obvious. The
    listener, if he is able to keep unswamped the first, will be amazed
    by their contrast to the second impressions. Awe, mystery and delight
    are the usual descriptions. The music can never be forgotten, and
    its penumbra will begin to tinge every action and thought. The dragon's
    teeth have been sown.

    When the music of Abhogie is heard for the third time, unless the listener
    be exceptionally mind-hardy or dull, it will all be soon up with him.
    Who can say how or what he feels? Immobile and unseeing, or whirling
    madly with jerking limbs, surely he still hears the music? Some say that
    the listener is rapt into another world, others that the music is a
    poison - a resonance that shatters the constraint which prudence and
    sanity gingerly maintain upon vestigial faculties developed long before
    the human age.

    Who, then, makes this perilous music? How could it have come to be?