Everyone has a song, I believe. Each utters meaning from the voice within. Walt Whitman splendidly conveys this idea in his “Song of Myself” prose, and the minstrel and great Hebrew King David expounds continually on this theme. A more contemporary example comes from one of my favorite singer/songwriters who passed away only a few years ago, Hoyt Axton, who sang “I am less than the song I am singing; I am more than I thought I could be”.
If I seem to be putting undue emphasis upon the importance of music in our lives, it’s only because music matters so much to me. I suppose only another musician can truly relate to my conversation about that tingling that effervesces from deep within whenever I get near a guitar, drum set, piano, etc. From my earliest recollections I have been fascinated with instruments: their shape, color, their flourishing, shining, dazzling designs. Oh! to be able to play them was equal to being a worker of miracles!
Despite my decades of experience with musical instruments, I still behold something miraculous in musical expression. The combination of sounds is never exactly the same, thereby making each musical instant unique, if not marvelous. We musicians look upon one another's performances with admiration, reverence, envy, and disdain, sometimes simultaneously, because we are so “in the moment” whenever we first hear a chord struck.
I cannot speak for that person who doesn’t play an instrument, sing in a choir, or even in the shower, yet I have observed the music motor humming within practically everyone I have ever known. So then I wonder if it is exaggeration to conclude that music connects with life at its very core.
There was a wonderful film back in the 1980s titled “Mr. Holland’s Opus”, in which an aspiring young musician finally faces his reality that he will not be able to subsist solely as a musical performer, and thus becomes a high school band director. Along with this disappointment, he is devastated to learn that his only son was born deaf. Mr. Holland’s challenge is to learn to connect with his son through a medium apart from sound, which in Mr. Holland’s case is particularly painful. Part of that connection comes when Mr. Holland notices that the boy, who has an avid interest in auto mechanics, is able to tune an engine through his sensitivities to its vibrations.
I use this example to defend my notion that music is much more intrinsic than we might first suspect. And because music is so intrinsic to our nature, it carries vast potential in its ability to affect us.
Music is almost always a part of ceremony or campaign to prompt people to action, to clinch the theme, to capture the hearts and minds of its listeners and lead them down the intended path. It summons the warrior to battle, calms tattered emotion, rejuvenates the the weary or indifferent soul, tugs the mournful and melancholy spirit to catharsis. The use of music as a force can be for good or for evil, and in its use I believe the musician holds a responsibility.
If I seem to be putting undue emphasis upon the importance of music in our lives, it’s only because music matters so much to me. I suppose only another musician can truly relate to my conversation about that tingling that effervesces from deep within whenever I get near a guitar, drum set, piano, etc. From my earliest recollections I have been fascinated with instruments: their shape, color, their flourishing, shining, dazzling designs. Oh! to be able to play them was equal to being a worker of miracles!
Despite my decades of experience with musical instruments, I still behold something miraculous in musical expression. The combination of sounds is never exactly the same, thereby making each musical instant unique, if not marvelous. We musicians look upon one another's performances with admiration, reverence, envy, and disdain, sometimes simultaneously, because we are so “in the moment” whenever we first hear a chord struck.
I cannot speak for that person who doesn’t play an instrument, sing in a choir, or even in the shower, yet I have observed the music motor humming within practically everyone I have ever known. So then I wonder if it is exaggeration to conclude that music connects with life at its very core.
There was a wonderful film back in the 1980s titled “Mr. Holland’s Opus”, in which an aspiring young musician finally faces his reality that he will not be able to subsist solely as a musical performer, and thus becomes a high school band director. Along with this disappointment, he is devastated to learn that his only son was born deaf. Mr. Holland’s challenge is to learn to connect with his son through a medium apart from sound, which in Mr. Holland’s case is particularly painful. Part of that connection comes when Mr. Holland notices that the boy, who has an avid interest in auto mechanics, is able to tune an engine through his sensitivities to its vibrations.
I use this example to defend my notion that music is much more intrinsic than we might first suspect. And because music is so intrinsic to our nature, it carries vast potential in its ability to affect us.
Music is almost always a part of ceremony or campaign to prompt people to action, to clinch the theme, to capture the hearts and minds of its listeners and lead them down the intended path. It summons the warrior to battle, calms tattered emotion, rejuvenates the the weary or indifferent soul, tugs the mournful and melancholy spirit to catharsis. The use of music as a force can be for good or for evil, and in its use I believe the musician holds a responsibility.
YES... YES....something about music. i have wondered about this many, many times and you have put it in words. I'm not a musician but someone can say something or say the same words with music and the meaning has a much deeper impact. The physics of sound, vibrations resonate somehow with who God is and His sounds. Great blog. "Yes music connects with life at its very core." You said it!
ReplyDeleteMakes me think of Coleridge and his thought (in "The Eolian Harp") that perhaps "all of animated nature / Be but organic harps diversely framed," ... that music can be found in everyone and everything...we all have our own, unique melodies of existence!
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