What an inspired choice Daniel Barenboim looks like being for this year’s Reith lectures. Wit, wisdom and a sense of wonder at the world shone through the first (of 5) talks this week entitled In The Beginning Was Sound. Significant to the content of his talks and symbolic to their purpose, the next four will take place in Chicago, Berlin, then Ramallah and finally Jerusalem.

In Chicago Barenboim will address issues close to his heart concerning the corrupted and diminished place of sound and music in Western culture at its epicentre – an image-dominated America. A visual culture implacably commercial in structure and spirit in which the degradation of the cultural value of music is best represented by the negative paradigm of Musak.

The impoverishment and corruption of language itself through bad education, notably in music, is the theme for Berlin. Barenboim signals an assault on the prevailing dominance of image over sound. A priority he wants to reverse. His view: that the ear is more important than the eye in making judgements and coming to what we might call a ‘sound’ perception of our world.

In Lecture 4 Barenboim will explore the possible significance in social and political affairs of the integration of competing and disparate elements essential to making music. And what more appropriate place on the planet to do this than Ramallah in Palestine?

And so to Jerusalem - for the man who has set up the West-Eastern Divan – an orchestra comprised of equal numbers of Palestinian and Israeli musicians – confronting the common challenges of music that unite, rather than the political and religious beliefs that divide. Here the metaphor of music is to be used to explore the difference between power and strength.

Barenboim’s conceptual thread for these talks will clearly be music as a metaphor for life. And what we might call a benign transcendence that induces a sense of questioning wonder at the inexpressible that enhances human experience rather than a destructive certainty that diminishes it. As he put it “I learn more about living from music than about how to make a living out of music.”

In a mere 20 minutes (40 minutes of questions followed) this opening lecture offered many passionate, wise and sometimes luminous thoughts to demonstrate he is more than up to the philosophical challenge he has set himself. And his insights are musical, emotional and social as well as Philosophical. Quoting the only definition of music that satisfies him “sonorous air” (Ferruccio Busoni) Barenboim reveals his questioning perspective in approving that this, “says everything and it says nothing.” This is a Reith lecturer who demands and will elicit genuine thoughtful engagement in his listeners. This is a master of his craft inviting you to share in the journey of discovery that is his art; not a cultural priest inviting obeisance to his privileged knowledge.

Barenboim’s philosophical objective: no less than trying to make some connection between the “inexpressible content of music, and maybe (sic), the inexpressible content of life.” Whether he will succeed in grounding his music-as-metaphor method on solid philosophical foundations remains to be seen but I for one am excited by the prospect of hearing him try.

His discussion of what one might call the deep ‘grammar’ of music was fascinating. His view: that the sense sound can have is related to the dynamic relationship is has to the silence that surrounds it. Thus the opening ‘interval’ in a piece of music is not from notes A – F but between the preceding silence and A. He observes that a note, a sound, has a natural life, best exemplified by percussion instruments – for a given input of energy, the life of the note is finite before it ‘dies’. We can only extend this ‘life’ through strings, woodwind and brass by expending continuous energy. A thought key to his theme emerges from this: that the essence of beauty in music lies precisely in it ephemeral nature. And musically he sees this sense of a note naturally ‘dying’, as “the beginning of the tragic element in music.”

The inimical nature of Musak and the inexhaustible capacity of electronics to create literally endless music lies in their indifference and disregard of precisely these elements critical to Barenboim’s concept of music. Effortlessly produced; instantly and constantly available; and lacking any meaningful context of silence against which the grammar and therefore sense of sounds can emerge. In a metaphor to which I am sure he will return, Barenboim says the musician’s task is to “create the feeling that the music has already been here, it is already going, and now much as you step on the train that is already going, you join it, you cannot start.”

I have tried only to touch on some of Barenboim’s key themes. All will be available on the BBC’s marvellous podcast and ‘listen-again’ services. The first is already there. I certainly will be making a date for Radio 4 Friday mornings at 9.am. If this review encourages just a few of you to do the same it will have served its purpose. This looks like a real treat not to be missed if you love ideas and music and unique insights into both.