Music is, and always has been, an important aspect of my life. I’m plugged in to my earbuds right now, in fact. Tonight, I enjoyed my university’s final spring concert. I was in one such concert myself a few weeks ago. The guitar is my father’s instrument of choice, and I grew up around his constant practicing.
At the concert tonight, one thing that really stuck with me were the words of the conductor preceding one of the pieces: “Music was in the beginning, and it will be at the end.” We tend to think of music as a hobby—unimportant. In some ways, it is. It isn’t essential to human survival.
What music does is, as C. S. Lewis says of art and philosophy, “give value to survival.”
No one truly needs music to survive, but there are some people, many in fact, who would claim that they couldn’t live without it. I think they’re right. They could survive, maybe, but I don’t think they could really live.
Music touches something in us that few other things can. Like the quote says, “Art decorates space; music decorates time.” Our eyes intake so much beauty in a day, from the masterpieces in art galleries to the dandelions growing in the cracks of the pavement. Those things are wonderful, but they are only one manifestation of beauty.
Sometimes I think it can be easy for us to focus so much on the beauty we see with our eyes that it becomes easy to take the art we hear with our ears for granted. Really, the ear picks up that kind of beauty, too, if we’d just stop to listen. Babbling brooks. Crickets. Wind in trees. Murmurings in a coffee shop.
Music is the result of humans harnessing the beauty of the ear and creating on its canvas.
Through music, we can express sides of ourselves that we may not be able to adequately express in any other way. Did you know that when a choir breathes in sync, their heartbeats will often sync up as well? When you join your voice or your instrument with a chorus of several others, you retain your own self, while also merging with the selves around you. This sense of community that assembled musicians can cultivate together is something unique to music as an art form.
By bypassing language, music can speak to the soul. Though not explicitly conveying anything, specific combinations of notes can express any range of emotive content. Sometimes, it can be hard to find the words needed to express emotion. Sometimes, music can do it for you.
As poetry is to language, music is to sound.
With poetry, form and style both matter immensely and don’t matter at all. It’s a very precise form of writing that breaks nearly every grammatical rule in the book, and even a few that aren’t. Similarly, music theory encompasses a vast field, such as the entirety of pitch and tonality, to name a few. These rules form the basis of music, and yet, to truly create, it is these rules that are often cast aside, or moved beyond.
My choir director once said she loves when everyone finishes a phrase at the exact same time, but that that kind of preciseness can overshadow what really makes the music special—the emotion backing the sound up. Proper style and form aren’t bad things at all; in fact, they’re necessary for giving the best performance of the piece possible. They aren’t, however, everything.
That’s the point here. My choir director didn’t say that so that we’d all stop practicing with the sheet music she gives us. She said it to point out that once that sheet music is learned, it’s time to let our bodies’ muscle memory take care of the form and use our minds and hearts to craft art from sound waves.
According to Carroll Pratt, “Music sounds the way emotions feel.”
Music is something deeply ingrained in the human experience, and as far back as we have been able to look, it always has been. I don’t think emotions will be leaving the human race any time soon, so I think it’s a safe bet to say that music will be sticking around, too.
