At 3.00pm on Good Friday, 1995, a small group of people gathered in an Anglican church in Melbourne to meditate.* As they listened to the 'Erbarme Dich' aria from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, some were visibly moved, and in recalling the event they spoke with a strange elation. Two years earlier I had been living in New York, and listened to the Passion repeatedly during Lent, alone in an apartment. I was similarly moved by this passage, at the moment of Peter's denial, my identification with the violin's melody perhaps being heightened by earlier experiences of playing the work in a student orchestra. It had been in 1981, in Tasmania. I was astounded by the melancholy beauty of my fellow-student's sound, to the point where it distracted me from my part. When Gerald English intoned the long melisma concluding the recitative, I could only guess vaguely that the German text spoke of Peter's weeping, yet even without fully comprehending its context I was riveted by the poignancy of the violin's musical utterance. Now understanding the text, and standing within a continuing tradition of Christian practice, I cannot readily hear the work in a state of detachment and 'aesthetic distance', yet my experiences with it lead me to ask some questions about my own processes of identification. Why does the violin's introduction to the aria bring such involvement? Is the emotion of the moment really one that can be identified in the music, apart from holding a position of Christian belief?. What is it in the music that allows a personal, and emotionally-charged, form of identification to take place? Why does the closure of the aria brings such satisfaction that it allows a new distancing, as if a painful emotion had been partially contained?