12-14-2010 Cultural Post #1: Music & me

 

“Music is the shorthand of emotion...” (Leo Tolstoy)

i wanted to write today about music and its importance to me.  i write all kinds of stuff: short stories, poems, political commentary, rap, theological treatises, etc., but – at heart – i am really and have always been a songwriter.  The reason?  Nothing moves me so much as music.

Tolstoy was right.  Linguists will tell You that music fits all the criteria of qualifying as a language, but mathematicians will tell You that music fits all the criteria of qualifying as a science.  As a former professional musician who sings, plays multiple instruments (including guitar, piano, percussion, & winds), produces, writes, performs, & arranges, i can tell You that music affects people in profound ways.  Now, that may seem obvious to everyone, but we don’t act like it’s obvious at all – at least not in the Western world and cultures.

A recurring theme of cultural posts here will be the difference between the Eastern and Western worlds.  Music serves as a good example of this dichotomy.

On 9/11, Westerners were shocked to see Islamic women pouring out of houses into the streets to scream in ecstasy about Americans dying by jumping from 100-story buildings and Islamic men dancing in throngs of thousands while burning flags and chanting themselves into frenzies.  Americans went on talk shows and discussed – albeit not always rationally – the situation.  The divergence of reactions could not have been clearer: Both Eastern and Western people reacted with emotion, but Easterners embraced their emotions and led with them while Western people actively tried to subdue or suppress their emotions and, for the most part, tried to remain calm and led with their intellect.  Even President Bush was derided when he stood in the Oval Office and teared up when addressing the press or when he stood on the rubble at Ground Zero with a bullhorn in hand and a firefighter at his side and promised that “the people who did this will hear from all of us soon.”  Such emotion – especially coming from our leader – was just unacceptable.  The overriding question that i remember hearing over and over and over again on network news and analysis was, “Why do the hate us so much, and who are they?”  As if mere information could address the situation…

The bottom line: Life is emotional, and – to understand Life, indeed, to embrace Life – You have to engage emotionally with it.  Otherwise, You end up more a robot than a human.

But that is the curse of the West: the belief that still plagues us from the days of Plato, Aristotle, & Socrates when it was birthed and then contagiously passed on through to the days of the Enlightenment when the virus matured into a full-scale paradigm known as “Modernity” that if we could just gain a complete enough access to information that we could solve any problem, overcome any obstacle, understand any mystery.  Nevermind the laments of geniuses like Tolstoy or Einstein when Albert remarked, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when creating them” or Carl Jung’s “Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain” that remind us that information doesn’t tell the whole story.  Nevermind Julia Cameron’s well put statement, “Mystery is at the heart of creativity. That, and surprise.”  Nevermind the countless statements of monks, shamans, priests of every religion, witches & warlocks, etc., etc. who know that not everything can be understood.  Oddly enough, this was a central tenet of Plato, too.

We were not meant to reduce the miracle of Life to well-organized data packs of intellectual bytes.

Yet, we act – especially here in the West and no where more than in America – like art, in general, and music, specifically, are valuable only in the sense that they can be commoditized and, therefore, owned & protected from unfettered, public, mutual use, sold & traded, and distributed & shared to those fortunate few who can pay the troll his toll.  This is at the heart of why so many Christians are offended by the commercialization of the Christmas holiday: even if they haven’t conceived of it this way or cannot articulate it as such, they know intuitively that the shopping madness has stripped away the emphasis on the mysterious incarnation.  The kenosis has lost its primacy, and shopping turns out to not be nearly as interesting or intriguing as divinity morphing into humanity and then becoming and remaining deity.

The West strips art, and specifically music, of its relevance, its importance, its profundity, its power, its inspiration when we treat it like a how-to manual for a carburetor and sell it for $19.99.  But, alas, i digress.  i’m not wanting to delve deeply today into the ills of commoditization as much as appeal to all of You to learn the more perfect way – the way of embracing music as a sign…a sign of Life, an evidence of passion, an impression in the soil that trackers could follow to see that someone was there once, a proof that Love, joy, & peace are cohabitating with pain, heartache, & misery, a witness that the spirit of beings is present and real and indisputable….

Music is a gift given to creation broadly (even the angels sing), but specifically to humanity by divinity…an innate tool that can reach into the very being of a person and seize both the soul and the body simultaneously and make them pay attention to the spiritual, because that’s what music is: a spiritual reality.  Music – and especially when combined with poetic words that get sung by a vocalist carrying a melody (whether or not it is enhanced with harmony) – is the native language of the spirit.  Music can say things that people can’t say, literally.  This is why people who stutter can sing brilliantly, because their brain actually views the two as completely different phenomeni.  This is why You can’t say the words to the Star-Spangled Banner (try it, if You don’t believe me).  This is why at the most vulnerable of moments, we sing when our mother dies or our son marries or a soldier sacrifices.  This is why we worship so disproportionately with music instead of equally with other just-as-valid expressions of worship such as building altars or keeping silence or eating in gratitude.  Music speaks for us when we can’t speak.  Music facilitates healing in us when we are stuck.  Music moves us….

i learned the alphabet by singing, and – despite a linguistic interest and gifting – i struggled at every other language i attempted in which i didn’t have an alphabet song.  i went to sleep (and sometimes still do) to adults singing to me.  Sometimes i just turn on Alison Krauss or Ella Fitzgerald or Norah Jones and fall asleep.  i dated girls to music, and that’s all i’ll say about that.  i prepared for athletic contests by listening to music.  i passed time with music as i worked in restaurants and on ranches and on highways driving.  i paid for college with music (partially).  i watch movies to music (though usually someone else is in charge of what accompanies what).  Music is powerful and – when done from an emotional platform instead of a commercial one – uniquely capable of affecting us.  This is why clerics gripe about backbeat-driven music and its affect on crowds and its promotion of group-think via peer pressure.  This is why psychologists describe its mood-altering affects and counsel people prone to certain tendencies away from certain kinds of music.  This is why we teach alphabets and Bible genealogies and other hard-to-learn lists with music.  This is why schools and countries and civic organizations teach “fight” songs (yes, i know…“fight” songs does strike me as i’m writing this) to condition their new members.  This is why Hitler and every major political leader in history (as well as our own political candidates in the modern era) co-opt pop music for their campaigns.  This is why music therapists (yes, they do exist) believe music can heal.  And this is why Your masseuse plays “soothing” new age music before and after (not just during) Your massage.  i could go on and on and on…

In the West, we don’t give music its due.  We relegate it to certain uses and tie its hands to only affect us in pre-approved ways.  But that is largely because we are Western, and – even for all our understanding – don’t really “get” Life very well.  We would do better to embrace the emotional and temper it with the rational, instead of dismissing the emotional & replacing it with the rational or eschewing the emotional & depending on the rational.

Music shows us that we are aLive.  Music means there is something to express that requires a special investment of effort.  Music lets us humans touch something that is other than us and beyond us: the divine.  The finger of the divine may be only a tiny bit away from the finger of the human in the famous “Creation of Adam” painting, but You can bet an angel is somewhere in the background with a harp playing and that the soundtrack just somehow didn’t make it into Michelangelo’s masterpiece.

Today, let music infuse Your Life.  Build a soundtrack to Your story over the next year.  Find that song that was playing when You lost Your virginity or that hymn that was sung when Your great-grandfather died or that chorus that You sang when Your niece got baptized or that song that blared when the opposing player fouled out at the basketball game or whatever, and let it move You.  If You’re able, let it shove You back to Life and give music permission to use as much force as necessary to do so.

Warning: Don’t settle for commercialized crap, either.  Some commercial stuff is fabulous, and – chances are, at least in this dumbed-down culture – that You may not even know of any non-commercial music.  But make sure that what You listen to is more about what can’t be said than what can, so that it took music to communicate the concept with the sentiment and, therefore, a spiritual merger of human and other-worldly aspects combined to form something metaspiritual or possibly even sacred.  Make sure that the people playing and singing are putting their heart and soul and mind and spirit into the music.  Make sure that passion is the marker of choice in what gets recorded into Your head by those artists to whom You choose to give influence instead of commercial interests like a 3 minute time limit or an aversion to the hard topics.

And, for God’s sakes, don’t sell it or analyze it.  If You have to do that, do it up front.  But, whatever You do, when You get ready to listen, quiet Yourself and really listen.  Let Yourself be moved and inspired and affected.  It’s just like drugs, or so i hear: the better the quality of the stuff, the better the ride….