The Emotional Truth at the Heart of Music
When we listen to songs we know whether we like them or not because of the way they make us feel. Music is art that requires a special kind of emotional connection that goes deeper and resonates more significantly than any other.
It’s a fact that there is no other art form that gets people up and dancing, tapping their feet and moving about. And it’s also true that the emotional connection songs and music provides makes it possible to listen to the same song over and over in a way that you can’t with a book or television series or film.
It’s not just that songs are more compact and more readily available, it’s because there is something in our human nature that makes it possible to repeatedly listen to the same song over and over to repeat the experience of the emotional impact it has us feeling. Poetry, also, in the lyrics of songs has a similar force, which is why the two are so often strung together.
Our emotional connection to songs is so strong that they can take us back to the way we were feeling about our life when we first heard the same piece of music. The French writer Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time) wrote about the way sounds and fragrances can take us back many years to another time and place and remind us vividly of who we were at that time in a way that deeply connects us to our sense of self through time.
The emotional truth at the heart of music is so hard to describe that it can only really be found by listening. So often the words we use to describe why we like something often leave us describing music in terms that are ambiguous and inadequate.
For example, people often use the word ‘creative’ to describe what people do when they make music. By calling something or someone ‘creative’ we are describing a process of manufacturing and weaving aspects of instrumentation and harmony together into a fabrication.
It might sound obvious, but songs really are the result of a long process of building arrangements that can sometimes be stripped down into bare simple piece of music or, at others, jam packed with a fully orchestrated framework of arrangements and carefully selected instrumentation. It’s a simple fact that songs are built.
But, in many ways, the words we used to describe the creativity of writing songs also describes them as an illusion that is formed and this goes against the idea that songs are also there to reveal a hidden emotional and spiritual truth.
Revealing emotional truth, it would seem, should happen by digging into our shared human experience. This is why songs feel as though they were written only for us in an honest way that describes directly what it is to feel human and brings us closer to the song writer.
So, on the one hand, songs and music are creative illusions that are fabricated, and, on the other, they are artworks that strip away the illusions and fabrications of life and take us to an essential emotional truth.
Perhaps the same musical motif that appears in the song Good Times by Chic is part of this emotional truth and this is what Niles Rogers (he wrote the guitar parts in Good Times) means when describes that song as being a starting point for the rhythm in Hip Hop.
The punchy guitar you can hear in the song also occurs in Another One Bites the Dust by Queen, I Need You Tonight by INXS and Radio Clash by the Clash.
The same emotional truth is also hidden somewhere the words of two poems written by two different English poets in the early 1800s. Both of these describe something of the nature of the eternity and reality.
One is the first stanza of Auguries of Innocence written by William Blake around 1803:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
And the other is in a stanza of ‘Adonais’, which was written by Percy Shelley in 1821:
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments
Whatever it is that lies at the heart of music, it reaches all of us emotionally and significantly and all we have to do is listen.
Post by James Gallaway