(Originally published March 1, 2009)
Let me say from the outset that I suffer from an extreme bias. I am a musician and a music teacher by vocation, so the idea that I will have any balanced perspective on the subject is completely out the window. The idea that musicians would have a balanced perspective on anything is absurd anyway. Most musicians I have known seem to split equal amounts of time between blowing their horn, listening to little-known records by lesser-known artists and ingesting large amounts of alcohol. They are, as a group, little noted for perspective. Take this Frank Zappa lyric for example:
I suppose that in an ontological discussion I would have to disagree with Frank and say that wisdom, truth and love are all more important than music, though I’d still pick music when I’m rolling down the highway late on a summer evening with the windows down and life feels just perfect. “Beauty,” “truth” and “wisdom” are mainly words after all and you can’t rock to words. And it goes without saying that you’d pick your wife, your mom and your children (though being childless at this point in my life, I do wonder) over music if you had to, but you don’t really have to, do you? I mean, I love my wife more than I love music, but the theoretical masked gunman is never going to break into our house and ask, “Which will it be: music or your wife?” Those types of abstract discussions are of interest in your dorm room late at night, but since college I have had very few interactions with masked gunmen. We live in a really safe neighborhood anyway.
I mean, just listen to the song that’s playing right now: “Walking On Sunshine,” by Katrina and The Waves. My wife doesn’t like it, but there is no accounting for taste. Come to think of it, I don’t think I liked it when it came out. Nevertheless, it is just the sort of thing I want to hear in the above-mentioned scenario involving the highway, car windows and a summer evening. That clever opening line (“I used to think maybe you loved me, now baby I’m sure”), the catchy horn riff, Katrina shouting, “Don’t it feel good?!” It’s just a great song. It makes you want to shout with her, “Yes! Yes! Yes! It DO feel good Katrina!” It’s one of those songs that can completely alter my mood, one of those songs that makes me feel that life is mostly good stuff happening to me and that no matter how crummy work is tomorrow or how much weight I have put on since Christmas or how bust my bank account currently is, at least there is this song!
It can go the other way though. The first record I ever bought by The Kronos Quartet was Black Angels, featuring the piece of the same name by George Crumb. For anyone who has not heard this piece of music, I would highly recommend it, though not if you’re on anti-depressants or suffer from any type of anxiety disorder. Its aural canvas is limited to the sounds four players can make with two violins, a viola and a cello (plus some other minor household items I think), but it sounds like Death and War and Terror and Pain. It’s one of those pieces you just can’t be neutral about. People hate it or they love it. The first time I heard it was with my college roommate and we both thought it was the most frightening thing we’d ever experienced. The thing was, we kept coming back to it and listening again and again and again.
In music school we used to discuss philosophies of music and how different musicians thought about the nature of music throughout history. I was really keen on the whole discussion, though a lot of students thought it was fairly pointless. (“Talking about music,” Louis Armstrong may or may not have said, “is like dancing about architecture.” A lot of musicians feel that way.) There is a lot of talk about music being “the language of the emotions,” which sounds kind of trite and a little like an “inspirational” poster marketed to music teachers, but I guess it’s true.
Supposedly there were a bunch of composers like Arnold Schoenberg and his buddies who thought that music should not be primarily emotional but a purely intellectual exercise. (I say supposedly because I don’t know that I’ve actually read what Schoenberg said on the subject. I’m getting this information primarily from music history professors who weren’t players anyway.) Really though, what’s the difference? Emotion is the product of our minds, just like thought, so I’m not sure it much matters. This false dichotomy between intellect and emotion gets bandied about in music circles quite a bit but it seems that the point is fairly moot. It may be that “Judy Is A Punk” is not particularly “intellectual” in the traditional sense, but The Ramones reach our emotions primarily through the cerebrum, the same way that old Ludwig Van does.
So what is it about music anyway? Assuming that you are a more normal person than me, you probably don’t place quite as high of a value on music as I do, but I would guess you probably have an iPod or a Discman or at least an 8-track machine of some sort. And you probably know the words to “Amazing Grace,” or “Home On The Range,” or “American Pie.” You probably sing in the car or the shower. You probably play an instrument or used to play or wish you did. There are some people who say they don’t like music, but I’ve never met someone who really disliked music. When someone says they don’t like music, they usually mean they don’t like talking about it all the time or they don’t like the music everyone else does or they only like the Stones’ albums from the seventies. I’ve never met anyone who went running from the room when music was played. I’m not saying these people can’t possibly exist, but I’ve taught public school for 12 years and I’ve never run into any.
So . . . what is it about music that we all love? Why can’t we worship or get married or bury someone without it? Why do we need to play it at football games, at parades, in the supermarket, at Starbucks? Why do movies seems so dull without it? Why do millions of teenagers spend every waking moment with their iPods in their ears?
I don’t know. At least, I don’t know the psychological and behavioral motivations behind our music obsession. (I’m reading a moderately interesting book right now – or at least, I was until it got interrupted by a couple of other more interesting books – called This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin that attempts to answer some of these questions. That has to be one of the worst titles I have ever seen, but it’s an interesting book nevertheless.) But there is something there that is more than the sum of its parts, something that is ephemeral and ineffable and transcendent.
Nick Hornby has written about how hard it is to be an atheist while listening to Rufus Wainwright harmonize with his sister, and while I’m not a big Wainwright fan (and I’m not really much tempted to atheism anyway), I think I know what he means. For me those glimpses of the holy happen while listening to the opening arpeggiated tenor saxophone figures on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Or hearing Pablo Casals develop those scales – they’re just scales for crying out loud! – on the Prelude from Bach’s first cello suite. Or when I hear The Soul Stirrers harmony behind Sam Cooke’s soaring tenor on “Touch The Hem Of His Garment” – especially when Cooke sings those slightly raspy (unusual for him, certainly) “Whooaas,” “Ohhhs” and “Iaaaahhhs” at the peak of the melody. Or listening to that final whistle on Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” that seems to tell us that, like Sophocles and Malcolm Arnold before him, Otis has resigned himself to the cycles of life, that as the Preacher told us there is truly nothing under the sun and even less that can be done about it. That this should be so is not really surprising. These pieces of music at least seem to be about the transcendent or trying to achieve transcendence in some way.
The thing about music, though, is that this is true not just about Trane on A Love Supreme, but its also true about Dizzy Gillespie on “Salt Peanuts.” It’s true about Lee Dorsey on “Ya Ya” (a new favorite song of mine) – the chorus of which tells us, “I’m sittin’ here La La waitin’ for my Ya Ya a-hummm.” It’s true about Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” and David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” and Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” and a million other songs that were never intended to communicate some profound truth. Songs about cars and parties and trains and boys named Sue and yellow polka-dot bikinis all seem to pull the trick. Our minds may not immediately turn to thoughts of eternity and life’s Ultimate Meaning, but there is something in those songs – in all music – that makes us feel more alive. Music makes joy seem more joyful and pain seem more present and desirable at the same time. It crystallizes our emotions into some kind of essence like a really potent, legal drug.
One of the things that is so offensive about music that is truly banal is that it doesn’t seem that hard to work this magic. I’ve heard elementary school kids do that bit of glamour banging five notes on a xylophone and I’ve heard 75-year-old ladies do it croaking their way through “Guide Me Oh Thou Great Jehovah.” It is part of the nature of music itself and even music that is flawed can transport us emotionally above the clouds and the atmosphere. That the Kenny Gs and Clay Aikens of this world seem so terrestrial in their musical trajectories is almost blasphemous.
Susan Langer, a music philosopher, has said that music makes time audible, which I think is something like what I am trying to say. Anyone who has listened to Barber’s Adagio for Strings will tell you that it can make time appear to move almost imperceptibly. Each note seems to pass in slow motion. On the other hand, “ABC” by the Jackson 5 is one the quickest ways to spend three minutes I know. The song is over before you think, “Was that the Jacksons?” Some songs can take you back in time. If I hear “I Wanna Be A Cowboy” by Boys Don’t Cry, in my mind I’m on a bus and in the 8th grade, coming home from a football game. (And yes, I did have to Google that song to find who sang it.) There are even those few songs that give you glimpses of the future. I remember hearing “American Tune” by Simon and Garfunkel when I was only 18 and feeling all the weight and weariness of my life after 40 or 50 years. (The lyric said, “I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees,” and it seemed so true, though everyone I knew was only beginning to dream about their lives.) Almost everyone has had experiences like this. Its at least part of what brings us to music over and over again. To quote Frank Zappa again: “Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.”
Music not only has this effect on time, it can have the same effect on personality. In No Direction Home, Bob Dylan talks about coming across an old 78 of Bill Monroe singing “Drifting Too Far From The Shore.” “The sound of the record made me feel like I was somebody else,” he says. That a Minnesota boy of Armenian-Jewish extraction should so immediately identify with this sound from the Appalachian Mountains might seem remarkable, but lots of us have had just that type of experience. An entire generation of white British teenagers felt like they were black bluesmen from the American South. Ghanaians have a particular affinity for the music of Dolly Parton. Lionel Ritchie is the sound of celebration for thousands in Qatar and Libya.
When I was in 7th grade, my favorite album was 1999. The apocalyptic perspectives of the title track and its anthemic insistence that we party all night in the face of imminent world annihilation seemed to be exactly what I was feeling the moment I heard it. My own experience with partying was limited to the Valentine Dance that year in the gym of Shady Spring Jr. High School (we had a live band!), but I was sure I would be up to it when Mr. Nelson insisted that we dance the night away. Similarly, “Little Red Corvette” spoke to me in a very familiar way, never mind that my experiences with both cars and sex were similarly limited and the synth-funk slow jam was light years away from the Hank Williams and Glen Miller my parents listened to at home. I was certain that if the Artist Then Known As Prince would visit my junior high he would find in me a kindred musical spirit and insist that I go on the road with The Revolution. I even asked my mom if I could buy a purple trench coat to wear to school, but she refused for reasons she has still never made clear.
The long and the short of this is that although I have an admitted bias, I’m pretty sure music is better than just about anything else. Books have some of the same powers that music has, but music can do in three minutes what it takes a book 50 pages to achieve and it doesn’t have to use words to accomplish it. Painting, sculpture, dance, theatre – all of these are great, don’t get me wrong. But one of these – dance – is almost completely dependent on music and another – theatre – is quite significantly improved by the addition of music. Sport doesn’t even begin to approach it.
So put those earphones on, close your eyes and push play. If you don’t know what to listen to, just ask. I have just the record that I know you’ll love.
Let me say from the outset that I suffer from an extreme bias. I am a musician and a music teacher by vocation, so the idea that I will have any balanced perspective on the subject is completely out the window. The idea that musicians would have a balanced perspective on anything is absurd anyway. Most musicians I have known seem to split equal amounts of time between blowing their horn, listening to little-known records by lesser-known artists and ingesting large amounts of alcohol. They are, as a group, little noted for perspective. Take this Frank Zappa lyric for example:
“Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not
truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST . . .”
I suppose that in an ontological discussion I would have to disagree with Frank and say that wisdom, truth and love are all more important than music, though I’d still pick music when I’m rolling down the highway late on a summer evening with the windows down and life feels just perfect. “Beauty,” “truth” and “wisdom” are mainly words after all and you can’t rock to words. And it goes without saying that you’d pick your wife, your mom and your children (though being childless at this point in my life, I do wonder) over music if you had to, but you don’t really have to, do you? I mean, I love my wife more than I love music, but the theoretical masked gunman is never going to break into our house and ask, “Which will it be: music or your wife?” Those types of abstract discussions are of interest in your dorm room late at night, but since college I have had very few interactions with masked gunmen. We live in a really safe neighborhood anyway.
I mean, just listen to the song that’s playing right now: “Walking On Sunshine,” by Katrina and The Waves. My wife doesn’t like it, but there is no accounting for taste. Come to think of it, I don’t think I liked it when it came out. Nevertheless, it is just the sort of thing I want to hear in the above-mentioned scenario involving the highway, car windows and a summer evening. That clever opening line (“I used to think maybe you loved me, now baby I’m sure”), the catchy horn riff, Katrina shouting, “Don’t it feel good?!” It’s just a great song. It makes you want to shout with her, “Yes! Yes! Yes! It DO feel good Katrina!” It’s one of those songs that can completely alter my mood, one of those songs that makes me feel that life is mostly good stuff happening to me and that no matter how crummy work is tomorrow or how much weight I have put on since Christmas or how bust my bank account currently is, at least there is this song!
It can go the other way though. The first record I ever bought by The Kronos Quartet was Black Angels, featuring the piece of the same name by George Crumb. For anyone who has not heard this piece of music, I would highly recommend it, though not if you’re on anti-depressants or suffer from any type of anxiety disorder. Its aural canvas is limited to the sounds four players can make with two violins, a viola and a cello (plus some other minor household items I think), but it sounds like Death and War and Terror and Pain. It’s one of those pieces you just can’t be neutral about. People hate it or they love it. The first time I heard it was with my college roommate and we both thought it was the most frightening thing we’d ever experienced. The thing was, we kept coming back to it and listening again and again and again.
In music school we used to discuss philosophies of music and how different musicians thought about the nature of music throughout history. I was really keen on the whole discussion, though a lot of students thought it was fairly pointless. (“Talking about music,” Louis Armstrong may or may not have said, “is like dancing about architecture.” A lot of musicians feel that way.) There is a lot of talk about music being “the language of the emotions,” which sounds kind of trite and a little like an “inspirational” poster marketed to music teachers, but I guess it’s true.
Supposedly there were a bunch of composers like Arnold Schoenberg and his buddies who thought that music should not be primarily emotional but a purely intellectual exercise. (I say supposedly because I don’t know that I’ve actually read what Schoenberg said on the subject. I’m getting this information primarily from music history professors who weren’t players anyway.) Really though, what’s the difference? Emotion is the product of our minds, just like thought, so I’m not sure it much matters. This false dichotomy between intellect and emotion gets bandied about in music circles quite a bit but it seems that the point is fairly moot. It may be that “Judy Is A Punk” is not particularly “intellectual” in the traditional sense, but The Ramones reach our emotions primarily through the cerebrum, the same way that old Ludwig Van does.
So what is it about music anyway? Assuming that you are a more normal person than me, you probably don’t place quite as high of a value on music as I do, but I would guess you probably have an iPod or a Discman or at least an 8-track machine of some sort. And you probably know the words to “Amazing Grace,” or “Home On The Range,” or “American Pie.” You probably sing in the car or the shower. You probably play an instrument or used to play or wish you did. There are some people who say they don’t like music, but I’ve never met someone who really disliked music. When someone says they don’t like music, they usually mean they don’t like talking about it all the time or they don’t like the music everyone else does or they only like the Stones’ albums from the seventies. I’ve never met anyone who went running from the room when music was played. I’m not saying these people can’t possibly exist, but I’ve taught public school for 12 years and I’ve never run into any.
So . . . what is it about music that we all love? Why can’t we worship or get married or bury someone without it? Why do we need to play it at football games, at parades, in the supermarket, at Starbucks? Why do movies seems so dull without it? Why do millions of teenagers spend every waking moment with their iPods in their ears?
I don’t know. At least, I don’t know the psychological and behavioral motivations behind our music obsession. (I’m reading a moderately interesting book right now – or at least, I was until it got interrupted by a couple of other more interesting books – called This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin that attempts to answer some of these questions. That has to be one of the worst titles I have ever seen, but it’s an interesting book nevertheless.) But there is something there that is more than the sum of its parts, something that is ephemeral and ineffable and transcendent.
Nick Hornby has written about how hard it is to be an atheist while listening to Rufus Wainwright harmonize with his sister, and while I’m not a big Wainwright fan (and I’m not really much tempted to atheism anyway), I think I know what he means. For me those glimpses of the holy happen while listening to the opening arpeggiated tenor saxophone figures on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Or hearing Pablo Casals develop those scales – they’re just scales for crying out loud! – on the Prelude from Bach’s first cello suite. Or when I hear The Soul Stirrers harmony behind Sam Cooke’s soaring tenor on “Touch The Hem Of His Garment” – especially when Cooke sings those slightly raspy (unusual for him, certainly) “Whooaas,” “Ohhhs” and “Iaaaahhhs” at the peak of the melody. Or listening to that final whistle on Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” that seems to tell us that, like Sophocles and Malcolm Arnold before him, Otis has resigned himself to the cycles of life, that as the Preacher told us there is truly nothing under the sun and even less that can be done about it. That this should be so is not really surprising. These pieces of music at least seem to be about the transcendent or trying to achieve transcendence in some way.
The thing about music, though, is that this is true not just about Trane on A Love Supreme, but its also true about Dizzy Gillespie on “Salt Peanuts.” It’s true about Lee Dorsey on “Ya Ya” (a new favorite song of mine) – the chorus of which tells us, “I’m sittin’ here La La waitin’ for my Ya Ya a-hummm.” It’s true about Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” and David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” and Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” and a million other songs that were never intended to communicate some profound truth. Songs about cars and parties and trains and boys named Sue and yellow polka-dot bikinis all seem to pull the trick. Our minds may not immediately turn to thoughts of eternity and life’s Ultimate Meaning, but there is something in those songs – in all music – that makes us feel more alive. Music makes joy seem more joyful and pain seem more present and desirable at the same time. It crystallizes our emotions into some kind of essence like a really potent, legal drug.
One of the things that is so offensive about music that is truly banal is that it doesn’t seem that hard to work this magic. I’ve heard elementary school kids do that bit of glamour banging five notes on a xylophone and I’ve heard 75-year-old ladies do it croaking their way through “Guide Me Oh Thou Great Jehovah.” It is part of the nature of music itself and even music that is flawed can transport us emotionally above the clouds and the atmosphere. That the Kenny Gs and Clay Aikens of this world seem so terrestrial in their musical trajectories is almost blasphemous.
Susan Langer, a music philosopher, has said that music makes time audible, which I think is something like what I am trying to say. Anyone who has listened to Barber’s Adagio for Strings will tell you that it can make time appear to move almost imperceptibly. Each note seems to pass in slow motion. On the other hand, “ABC” by the Jackson 5 is one the quickest ways to spend three minutes I know. The song is over before you think, “Was that the Jacksons?” Some songs can take you back in time. If I hear “I Wanna Be A Cowboy” by Boys Don’t Cry, in my mind I’m on a bus and in the 8th grade, coming home from a football game. (And yes, I did have to Google that song to find who sang it.) There are even those few songs that give you glimpses of the future. I remember hearing “American Tune” by Simon and Garfunkel when I was only 18 and feeling all the weight and weariness of my life after 40 or 50 years. (The lyric said, “I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees,” and it seemed so true, though everyone I knew was only beginning to dream about their lives.) Almost everyone has had experiences like this. Its at least part of what brings us to music over and over again. To quote Frank Zappa again: “Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.”
Music not only has this effect on time, it can have the same effect on personality. In No Direction Home, Bob Dylan talks about coming across an old 78 of Bill Monroe singing “Drifting Too Far From The Shore.” “The sound of the record made me feel like I was somebody else,” he says. That a Minnesota boy of Armenian-Jewish extraction should so immediately identify with this sound from the Appalachian Mountains might seem remarkable, but lots of us have had just that type of experience. An entire generation of white British teenagers felt like they were black bluesmen from the American South. Ghanaians have a particular affinity for the music of Dolly Parton. Lionel Ritchie is the sound of celebration for thousands in Qatar and Libya.
When I was in 7th grade, my favorite album was 1999. The apocalyptic perspectives of the title track and its anthemic insistence that we party all night in the face of imminent world annihilation seemed to be exactly what I was feeling the moment I heard it. My own experience with partying was limited to the Valentine Dance that year in the gym of Shady Spring Jr. High School (we had a live band!), but I was sure I would be up to it when Mr. Nelson insisted that we dance the night away. Similarly, “Little Red Corvette” spoke to me in a very familiar way, never mind that my experiences with both cars and sex were similarly limited and the synth-funk slow jam was light years away from the Hank Williams and Glen Miller my parents listened to at home. I was certain that if the Artist Then Known As Prince would visit my junior high he would find in me a kindred musical spirit and insist that I go on the road with The Revolution. I even asked my mom if I could buy a purple trench coat to wear to school, but she refused for reasons she has still never made clear.
The long and the short of this is that although I have an admitted bias, I’m pretty sure music is better than just about anything else. Books have some of the same powers that music has, but music can do in three minutes what it takes a book 50 pages to achieve and it doesn’t have to use words to accomplish it. Painting, sculpture, dance, theatre – all of these are great, don’t get me wrong. But one of these – dance – is almost completely dependent on music and another – theatre – is quite significantly improved by the addition of music. Sport doesn’t even begin to approach it.
So put those earphones on, close your eyes and push play. If you don’t know what to listen to, just ask. I have just the record that I know you’ll love.
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