Music: the Gift that Keeps On Giving
without Rhythm, there is no Life.
without Harmony, there is no Unity.
without Melody, there is no Self.
i once had a professor of music fundamentals begin the semester by arrogantly defining music as ‘whatever you think it is’. although music may still be near impossible to properly define, i must confess that i deeply resent a definition that begins with the word ‘whatever’. music is most definitely a ‘something’, and that something is not just a ‘whatever you think’. for example, suppose it is the end of a long and frustratingly dull day and your neighbor rings you up on your telephone and says ‘how does a cheeseburger and a cold pint sound right about now, neighbor? its my treat.’ and you respond by saying ‘that sounds like music to my ears, neighbor’. now you don’t actually mean that a cheeseburger is music…do you? i mean, could it be true that a cheeseburger sounds like music? because given said professor’s demeaning definition, you could actually argue and thereby conclude that ‘because music is whatever you think it is, and my neighbor thinks that a cheeseburger sounds like music, therefore music is a cheeseburger’. which is absolute and utter nonsense, unless you are living in pee-wee herman’s playhouse, whose address is on sesame street somewhere in mr. roger’s land of make-believe. everywhere else, we must understand that music is most certainly not a cheeseburger. and as an aside before i drop the topic, no matter how sexy your French-american accent might be, a hamburger is also not music.
as far as offering a better answer to the question, ‘what is music?’, i’m afraid the definition still eludes me. music is something special, albeit invisible and therefore harder to capture and adequately express into words. a good definition defines the boundaries between what something is and what it is not, so that we may then use logic to distinguish between what things actually are. and music is not ‘whatever’. it is elusive by nature, and impossible to hold it your hand. it touches the senses, most obviously the auditory sense, although i have heard there are some who can experience music as streams of vibrant color. i once stayed with a community of deaf-mutes deep in the forgotten regions of Mexico, and come the September independence day and the locals blasting mariachi music from where ever they could in celebration of the event, these people who could not hear and who could not talk suddenly got super excited and began to dance to the rhythms of the music while i watched. though they were all deaf from birth and could only communicate by sign, still the music touched them. i can only conclude that what they could not hear with their ears they could still feel in their bones, and the good vibrations moved them to want to dance.
i remember back to my teenage days, when we were all fighting for the attention of our elders and struggling to make a name for ourselves among our peers…they call that world ‘high school’. and i am glad it is well in the past. it was a time when our identities were not so much defined by an individuality created by experiences in our own unique inner worlds, but rather you identified by association: what actors you liked, and what musicians you liked, ect. and i remember responding to the question about my favorite music with this: ‘first, i turn on the faucet to a slow drip; then i crack the window just a bit to let the wind chime in, and that provides a rhythmic backdrop for whatever humming and buzzing is going on in the house as a result the of human activity they call ‘normal life’, and that is what kind of music i usually listen to.’ and it was true, that back in those days—due to the parental imposition of religiously motivated conservative fundamentalist restraints—i was so starved for music in my life that i began to tune into the interactions between organic and synthetic life: there are the sounds made by the natural world like the wind rustling through the trees and the bird calls in the morning and cicadas at night; and then there are the mechanical sounds of cars rushing by and police sirens and the telephone ringing and the refrigerator humming on a hot day cuz it, too, is trying to cool itself; and then there are the humans…talking, walking, bumping into things and shouting…you get the drift. and this cacophony of sounds at first sounds like chaos, but if you can take a step back from the madness and listen like it’s just life’s soundtrack, sometimes a semblance of something musical emerges…meaning a sort of harmonic order or rhythmic pattern that is almost musical…until discord once again reclaims its domain and that hint of musicality has vanished. but sometimes…it really happened…and i heard the elements of music emerge from the midst of the random happenstance and the hum-drum routine of daily life. and it sounded like a subtle sense of organization started to take hold of the layers of sounds produced by the war between the worlds, between mother nature and father time and the steady advancement of human domination fueled by a contradiction of dark causes invisible conditions and so many small creatures caught like victims in the mix. i still listen for those moments when the sounds of life are starting to rearrange into a resemblance of something musical; and when i feel the stirrings of that kind of magic is when i pay attention: in my world that is the sound of a great cosmic convergence and i want to do my part to bring the music that i hear is just beginning into being.
i still don’t know how to define music, but i have gotten increasingly confident in my ability to identify music when i hear it, as well as to distinguish between music that is well-done and music that has been poorly-made. when music is poorly-made, it can cause feelings of frustration or frenzy; but when music is well-made, it has a positive effect on its listener, for the purposes of relaxation or for motivation. and then there is that music which has the power to stir the deeper emotions and move the listener to cathartic tears. and then there is the music that is defined by the sounds of defiance, such punk-rock or hip-hop. these genres of music have gotten popular because they speak to a darker sector of the suppressed mental-emotional experience which is traditionally denounced by the politically powerful religious hypocrites of society…however, the musical expressions endure because fans found a way through music to empathize with one another’s struggle. because sometimes it does help to talk about it.
what music is—we must agree—is still mostly a mystery. but just because all the existing definitions can be easily debunked and we humans are not yet perceptive enough to set down a suitable definition that clearly expresses the essence of music…that does not mean that it is therefore true that ‘music is whatever you think it is’. that would mean that music is a fully subjective experience that only exists in the listener’s own mind and then is there even a point to trying to define it? but remember, according to modern physics, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it does make a sound. and because some elements of music theory can be objectively studied and identified in our natural environment, then it is also true that music can be made, can be played, even, by father time and mother nature with no one around as a witness and music would still exist independent of a subejectively-thinking audience. so…lets take a step back and admit to ourselves that its okay if we don’t yet understand. and then lets take some time to assimilate into our knowledge bank these new arguments and weed out outdated ideas and outright lies that we have all been taught and may have even previously believed. now, all of the definitions that i have found so far do not do so much to define music as to define some aspect of music, or else say something not about what it is but rather what it is like. like these quotes that i found hidden in the world wide web…all of with which i agree:
Confucius: music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.
Ludwig van Beethoven: music can change the world.
Hans Christian Anderson: where words fail, music speaks.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: music is the universal language of mankind.
Friedrich Nietzsche: without music, life would be a mistake…I would only believe in a god who knew how to dance.
Guy de Maupassant: a strange art—music—the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.
Aldous Huxley: after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Marilyn Manson: music is the strongest form of magic.
Animal the Muppet drummer: music is everywhere.
in the end, music is essential: without rhythm, there is no life, meaning that the stability of the particle field depends upon a deeply ingrained sense and agreement of rhythm in their infinitesimal but unceasing movements. and without harmony, there is no unity, because harmony is the opposite of discord; and the very meaning of harmony implies a deep cooperation between a diversity of elements that facilitates the possibility of seamless co-existence. and without melody, there is no self, because melody is that uniqueness that emerges from the universal melting pot to become something different, to differentiate itself as something distinct from all the forms of matter and energy that surround it. music is the greatest metaphor for life. and when made as it should be made, is nothing less than pure magic.
