Music: Meaning, Movement, Modulations
If there were no humans, would music still be a property of the cosmos?
Most of us—us, being humans on Earth now and back to the caves—have known at least a few unexpected moments when the sound that reaches our ears in the form of music “moves us”.
We close our eyes to focus with intense clarity on the “movements” of Vivaldi or Debussy and we sway gently, we lift our closed eyes to the heavens. We ache with beauty and longing—right there: That phrase, those few measures especially bring us to tears.
Other moments, we are moved to become part of the music, our bodies becoming instruments of rhythm if not percussion, driven by the impulse to dance. Arms and legs oscillate to a beat so primal we cannot know it. But others through time and across the Third Planet have known it all along.
What lives and breathes through music that reaches us in this way? Is music, like mathematics, built into the very fabric of the universe? Do the quantum particles that make up matter across the cosmos vibrate, resonate, oscillate with a property we could think of as music—a music of the spheres?
But more immediately, back to the listener alone in a room with a bitter-sweet melody that has the power to touch the soul. How does that happen? And was the composer of that music striving to create that emotion in us by first feeling it himself—so that we recreate a shared moment of rapture identical to the one that was scribbled onto the bass and treble lines of that piece of classical or contemporary music we love so much that we cannot bear it?
If this is true, then music is telling a story; is a profoundly intimate intercourse with the creator who, three hundred or three years ago, wanted to say to us just exactly what we hear in his very voice. We experience an emotional resonance with someone who has himself heard the meaning and metaphor in the music in his soul and is able to send it into that part of our brains where we feel more than know the story he or she is telling.
And like Aesop’s Fables or the Jack Tales, musical stories are retold over and over, bits of one story borrowed for a new one that shares some of the events and characters of the original.
Eric Carmen borrowed from the second movement of the second concerto by Rachmaninoff. David Foster produced it so that Celine Dion could sing it and we could hear the story, retold, and be moved.
What song would you offer that turns your head inside out? Do you feel a kind of yearning for a thing you cannot name and can never quite touch—a pain of missing home: nostalgia for a place you’ve never been, evoked by a melody?
“Music makes you feel feelings. Lyrics make you think thoughts. Songs make you feel thoughts.” David Bruce
►NOTE: There will likely be one final installment in this series on MUSIC.
The prompt for this thread of thought was triggered by the song All By Myself, written by Eric Carmen.
Here’s the background: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/All_by_Myself
Here’s the performance:
Here’s the detailed analysis by Adam Neely of the crucial “modulations” that give this tune its power to move us. He calls it "the most elegant key change in all of pop music.” This dissection adds rather than takes life way from the music, its physics understood in a musician’s heart, not just his mind.
I've often asked myself the same questions about music. One interesting aspect is that mankind may have first been imitating birds and other wildlife. NPR did a feature on how the notes of an old jazz song were sung by birds hanging out in New Orleans' French Quarter. So who sang/played them first...the birds or the composer?
That analysis was very interesting, even to someone with no music education.