I had a few experiences this evening that got my brain going back over the relationship between music and truth. (Yes, this is going to be another more philosophical/spiritual post rather than a technical one.) This is something I've thought about a great deal throughout my life. The relationship between music and truth is also something I haven't payed much attention to for the past couple of years. More on this soon... The recent experiences that stirred up my thinking anew were these:
1 - Listening to three a cappella songs by Ravel that I'd sung in choir while I was in grad school and hadn't listened to for several years. One in particular, Three Birds Of Paradise (translated), moved me almost to tears while sitting on the bus. It did that to me 15 years ago even after countless rehearsals. There's a truth and a tenderness in that piece, regardless of who's singing it or where/when I'm listening to it, that transcends time in my own life.
2 - Having dinner and playing board games with two old friends, one of whom is experiencing the rather slow loss of his sister to cancer. His ideas about life and reality have often been found challenging by many who meet him. Tonight, they had the common element of "daring," but playfully and engagingly, even happily so.
3 - Reading a great article about "left" versus "right" in the political climate and what this editor believes journalism should be aiming for. The article, for me, reached beyond extremes and compromises. It spoke of reality in a dynamic and ultimately undefinable way that we rarely find in "news" reporting.
That's the stage. There's obviously far more to it than that, but there are the more immediate influences. Those are the things that I've been paying attention to tonight.
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My general thought is this - Music is a language. It's a way of communicating. We can communicate many things with one another - concepts, desires, images, feelings, realizations, formulas, regrets, beliefs... We use spoken language so regularly and for so many things that I wonder if many of us give pause to consider what we're trying to communicate at all when we speak. I wonder how often most of us pay attention to what's being said when we think we're listening.
Music is a language. It's a way of communicating. It's a LESS COMMON (I'm shouting...) way of communicating that speaking or writing. That doesn't make it less effective or more important. It DOES make it less familiar. That means we pay more attention. We tend to pay less attention to what is familiar and more attention to what is less familiar.
We tend to pay more attention to music whether "speaking" or listening. When we're paying closer attention to what we say and to what we're listening to, we're more likely to communicate something that is a deeper truth and we're more likely to hear that truth. If you're among those who create music, take a moment to consider the truth that you're speaking. If you're more a listener than a player, take a moment to think about what you're listening to. Are you really listening? What is the music telling you?
Brant Grieshaber - guitarist
Guitar Teacher
I actually was led to think about this same music/truth relationship for the first time in a while the other day, listening to Shostakovich's String Quartet #8. It's a downright frightful and brutal piece in places -- a very effective communication of the essential historical truths of his era.
ReplyDeleteIt's true what you say that music is less common than speech/prose, so it's perhaps more considered. In the same spirit, many people never write music at all (although on the other hand, maybe everyone uses music to communicate -- e.g. schoolyard chants), so it's interesting to consider what drives some people into the business/hobby of music making -- is it just oodles of talent, or are they more likely to feel they have something important that they need to communicate with music?
Michael, these are interesting things to consider. For one, yes, we all use music on some level to communicate. Some cultures rely on it more than others - For example, all dialects of Chinese rely on the use of tones. The inflection of a syllable changes the meaning, so the ability to distinguish between changes in pitch is crucial to understanding and speaking the language. Another example is that the descending minor third is prominent in simple songs that children sing in virtually every culture. "Na, na. Na, na. na na na na na na...."
ReplyDeleteAnother interesting phenomenon is that there are certain alzheimers patients or people who suffer brain trauma who lose the ability to speak, but are able to sing lyrics from songs they knew before and find ways of communicating verbally this way. It's fascinating.
The question of what drives some people to building a career in music is something I intend to give thought to over the coming days and post about later.