“Breath easily marks the existence of life just as its absence works as a peculiar indicator of the grave. The substitution of breath for life, a synecdochic exchange, is part of the lingua franca of literature’s signification both of life and its fragility. [...]

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If endless breath is not for human beings, it is perhaps no wonder that some poets have attended to its figurative possibility in music. Only one inanimate object has been through history habitually described as having lungs or as being capable of a kind of mechanical ‘breathing’. Sometimes, to be sure, [...] vast marshes or quicksands have seemed to breathe; and we are now familiar with the notion of the great forests as the ‘lungs’ of the world and the perils to our literal breath of their destruction by human beings. But the vocabulary of breath has for many centuries been more-than-established for describing the pipe organ: by listeners, players, and organ builders. [...]

The organ’s breath is that of angels. Once God breathed literal life into Adam in Genesis 2:7; so another act of respiration brings, instead, echoes of the music of the heavens to humanity through the organ. This connection between a musical instrument and the breath of immortal beings—breath that cannot die, breath that is a foretaste or, rather, fore-hearing of eternity, took, I think, a fresh form with the development, in the nineteenth century, of more sophisticated forms of organ blowing."

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