In a lifetime of dwelling on this physique, I’ve identified no extra highly effective a homecoming than music — nothing roots us extra firmly into the home of being, nothing levitates us extra buoyantly to that transcendent place past marrow and thoughts. Stripped of its nihilistic drama, there may be an elemental cry of reality, for me at the least, in Nietzsche’s pronouncement: “Without music life would be a mistake.” Even Edna St. Vincent Millay, for all her lyrical love of life, echoed the sentiment: “Without music I should wish to die. Even poetry, Sweet Patron Muse forgive me the words, is not what music is.”
Each author unblinded by ego will concede this.
No author has conceded it extra superbly or with extra rapturous reverence for the lifetime of the physique within the lifetime of music than Richard Powers in his beautiful 2003 novel The Time of Our Singing (public library).
One of many novel’s protagonists — a younger black girl in Nineteen Thirties Philadelphia — turns into an emissary of the ability of music as an instrument of self-discovery and self-possession, a dwelling testomony to track because the pulse-beat of the soul:
Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was one thing that may make sense of an individual. Singing would possibly make extra sense of life than dwelling needed to begin with.
Delia sang fearlessly. She threw again her head and nailed free-flying notes like a marksman nails skeet. She sang with such unfurling of self that the congregation couldn’t assist however flip and take a look at {the teenager}, even when they need to have been trying skyward.
[…]
Delia might really feel them as she sang, the hearts of the flushed congregation flying up along with her as she savored the track’s arc. She sheltered these souls in her sound and held them as immobile because the notes themselves, in that secure spot up subsequent to grace. The viewers breathed along with her, beating to her measure. Her breath expanded sufficiently to take her throughout even the longest phrase. Her listeners had been in her, and he or she in them, as long as the notes lasted.
When Delia marries a German-Jewish physicist who performs the piano and think about music “the language of time,” music takes on a richer that means — or, relatively, it’s stripped right down to its elemental uncooked materials — for with out the arrow of time, with out having the ability to inform one second from the subsequent, there could possibly be no melody and no rhythm. That is what makes music our supreme laboratory for feeling and time.
Ultimately, the couple’s sons uncover music on their very own phrases, in their very own time. One in all them — the novel’s first-person narrator — encounters its energy and tenderness harmonized in a soul-stilling efficiency of historic music by a choir at The Cloisters — the medieval monastery turned museum within the uppermost reaches of Manhattan, simply previous Harlem. The small boy, untainted with ideas, experiences music in its purest type, pouring out of the singers like dawn, like one thing of one other world, but saturated with pure translucent presence, in that peculiar means transcendent experiences have of taking us each past and deeper into ourselves:
Silence falls, erasing all separateness. Then the silence offers option to its solely reply. That is the primary public live performance I’ll keep in mind ever listening to. Nothing I’ve already lived by prepares me for it. It runs by and rearranges me. I sit on the middle of a globe of sound pointing me towards myself.
It doesn’t happen to me, on the age of seven, that an individual would possibly luck upon such a track solely as soon as a lifetime, if ever. I understand how to inform sharp from flat, proper singing from mistaken. However I haven’t but heard sufficient to inform peculiar magnificence from once-only visits.
[…]
There’s a sound just like the burning solar. A sound just like the surf of blood pumping by my ears. The ladies begin by themselves, their observe as spreading and dimensionless as my father says the current is. Keee, the letter-box slots of their mouths launch — simply the syllable of glee little Ruth made earlier than we persuaded her to be taught to speak. The sound of a easy creature, startling itself with reward earlier than settling in for the night time. They sing collectively, certain on the core for one final second at first breaks open and is born.
Then reee. The observe splits into its personal accompaniment. The taller girl appears to descend, simply by holding her pitch whereas the smaller girl subsequent to her rises. Rises a significant third, that first interval any baby any colour anyplace learns to sing. 4 lips curve upon the vowel, a pocket of air older than the creator who set it there.
I do know in my physique what notes come subsequent, despite the fact that I’ve nothing, but, to name them. The excessive voice rises an ideal fifth, lifting off from the decrease observe’s mattress. The strains transfer like my chest, delicate cartilage, my ribs straying away from each other, on aaay, into a better brightness, then collapsing again to fuse in unison.
I hear these two strains bending house as they velocity away from one another, hurling outward, every standing nonetheless whereas the opposite strikes. Lengthy, short-short, lengthy, lengthy: They circle and return, like a blowing department submitting once more to its shadow. They close to their beginning pitch from reverse sides, the shared spot the place they need to impossibly meet again up. However simply earlier than they synchronize to see the place they’ve been, simply as they contact their lips to this recovered residence, the boys’s strains come from nowhere, pair off, and repeat the splitting sport, an ideal fourth under.
Extra strains splinter, copy, and set off on their very own. Aaay-laay Aaay-laay-eee! Six voices now, repeating and remodeling, every peeling off by itself agenda, syncopated, staggered, but every with a watch on the opposite, midair acrobats, not one among them wavering, nobody crashing towards the host of shifting targets. This stripped-down easy singsong blooms like a firework peony. All over the place within the woke up air, in a bathe of staggered entrances, I hear the primary phrase, keyed up, melted down, and rebuilt. Harmonies pile up, disintegrate, and reassemble elsewhere, every melody praising God in its personal vogue, and in every single place combining to one thing that sounds to me like freedom.
Towards the top of the novel, a long time and disillusionments later, Powers returns to music because the supreme instrument of our self-knowledge:
Using music is to remind us how brief a time we now have a physique.
Complement with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe and violinist Natalie Hodges on the scientific poetics of sound and feeling, then revisit the remarkable story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
