“Let the music keep our spirits high”
In his song Before The Deluge, Jackson Browne uses this lyric, straight after the words..
“Let the buildings keep our children dry”
..as if these are among the very few basic needs or desires of Mankind.
It seems that, going back at the least hundreds of years, we humans have cherished making sound for no apparent reason. Under no obligation we cry out loud, we beat drums, we dance & chant, alone and in groups. We do this for pleasure, pain and for no reason at all other than personal choice.
Then we developed pitched instruments, other than the voice. It was a very long time before those cherished chants and cries became formalised, like almost all the music we hear nowadays.
But still as new born babies, we use sound to get attention, crying in discordant assaults, to get what we need, or to bring attention to what we are missing and want to stop doing without.
And so it seems clear that we need music, we need sound and we need to share it with others, as well as to be alone with it.
Music is vibration. Vibration of the air around us and within us. And when we make sounds deliberately, we control that movement. We are the instrument of our desires. We become a part of what we produce.
One of the reasons I love playing acoustic guitars, is because the back of them vibrates against me. I believe for example that it is impossible to play music we really don’t like, as in the end the act of doing it makes us feel bad, even ill or just lost or in a bad mood.
So just playing an acoustic instrument for a long time elicits sounds that are sympathetic to our own nature, harmonising us with the world, around us and within us.
Of course music can be a pacifying thing to do but it can also deliver questions to us, as we get lost in the music and ideas come up, without the censorship sometimes present, that we need to navigate daily life quite reasonably.
While I wouldn’t want to lose myself in music while crossing a busy road, I would very much want to lose myself in music, so I can relax for example. And more than that I seek out what music can present to me, when I follow a path through some improvising, or a beautiful arrangement, or a composition that I am honing down over a period.
It seems that music in the most basic sense, is within us and all around us and is a harmonising activity. For me that is mostly why I play, for the harmony it offers, if I can follow it’s call.
When we use the phrase “a calling” for some jobs or activities, we are using a term which states that something is “calling” us to do that thing. And that is a musical term off course as well. We are called to music, we are called to prayer, we have a calling in life.
When we play music we are both following that calling and calling out the music from within ourselves, at the same time.