“A tough sound was polished till it turned a smoother sound, which was polished till it turned music,” the poet Mark Strand wrote in his ode to the enchantment of music. Music is essentially the most indescribable of the humanities, and which may be what makes it essentially the most highly effective — the artistic pressure greatest able to giving voice and form to our most ineffable experiences and most layered longings, of containing them and increasing them directly. It’s our supreme language for the exhilaration of being alive.
I’ve encounter no finer definition of music than thinker Susanne Langer’s, who conceived of it as a laboratory for feeling in time. Time, certainly, isn’t solely the uncooked materials of music — the elemental constructing block of melody and rhythm — but in addition its supreme present to the listener. A tune is a shelter in time, a shelter in being — music meets us at explicit moments of our lives, enters us and magnifies these moments, anchors them within the stream of life, so that every time we hear the tune once more the residing self is transported to the lived second, and but reworked.
That’s what the uncommonly insightful painter, poet, and author John Berger (November 5, 1926–January 2, 2017) explores in his essay “Some Notes on Track,” composed within the final months of his life and included in his altogether fantastic remaining assortment Confabulations (public library).
Berger considers how music, in bridging the common and the deeply private, illuminates the which means of intimacy:
A lot of what occurs to us in life is anonymous as a result of our vocabulary is simply too poor. Most tales get instructed out loud as a result of the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can remodel a anonymous occasion into a well-known or intimate one.
We are inclined to affiliate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a sure sum of shared experiences. But in actuality complete strangers, who won’t ever say a single phrase to one another, can share an intimacy — an intimacy contained within the change of a look, a nod of the pinnacle, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness that lasts for minutes or at some point of a tune that’s being listened to collectively. An settlement about life. An settlement with out clauses. A conclusion spontaneously shared between the untold tales gathered across the tune.
It’s the luscious corporeality of tune that lends music its extraordinary powers of intimacy. In consonance with Richard Powers’s arresting commentary that “the use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body,” Berger writes:
A tune, when being sung and performed, acquires a physique… Many times the tune takes over the physique of the singer, and after some time the physique of the circle of listeners who, as they pay attention and gesture to the tune, are remembering and foreseeing.
A tune, as distinct from the our bodies it takes over, is unfixed in time and place. A tune narrates a previous expertise. Whereas it’s being sung it fills the current. Tales do the identical. However songs have one other dimension, which is uniquely theirs. A tune fills the current, whereas it hopes to achieve a listening ear in some future someplace. It leans ahead, farther and farther. With out the persistence of this hope, songs wouldn’t exist. Songs lean ahead.
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A tune borrows existent bodily our bodies so as to purchase, whereas it’s being sung, a physique of its personal.
Music is so embodied an expertise as a result of it’s product of the identical substance we ourselves are made of: time. With an eye fixed to how “songs put their arms round linear time,” Berger provides:
The tempo, the beat, the loops, the repetitions of a tune supply a shelter from the stream of linear time — a shelter by which future, current, and previous can console, provoke, ironize, and encourage each other.
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Songs are like rivers: every follows its personal course, but all stream to the ocean, from which all the things got here.
Complement with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe and the fascinating science of how music casts its spell on us, then savor Beethoven’s “Ode to Pleasure” brought to life in a Spanish flashmob of 100 musicians.
