Question #2: What Does Music Mean to You?

Part of the Q&A series, today’s question comes from none other than mom herself:

“What does music mean to you, or why is it so important to you?”

Is suspect most people would reflexively answer that music is emotion, or the expression of emotion, or something along those lines. However, I can never quite accept such an explanation. Indeed, increasingly I find that this is not entirely the case. Or else if music is an expression of emotion, as everyone keeps telling me, then emotions are something quite different than what I have hitherto understood.

Let’s start off with fact that I grew up with music. It was more than the fact that my father played the guitar and that I can remember slices of my childhood accompanied by the clear strings of his rhythm; more importantly was the fact that my parents exposed me to the arts from a very young age. I have been going to live performances of various types of classical music since I can remember – perhaps my earliest memory of a concert was Beethoven’s Ninth. When my brother quickly showed signs of musical prodigiousness, he was ushered into various school bands, and a bit later in time I showed some desire and took up the piano. I have been going to band performances and field shows and recitals all my life, and it was this appreciation of music as an art form that lead me to the point where I regarded it as a science. Playing the piano and studying music in general revealed to me that the art of music itself was a kind of math. Anyone who has played an instrument or can read music knows the intensely mathematical precision of the whole endeavor. Even if you were to ignore this (as I did when I was first learning to play the piano), there is really no escaping such a realization once one sits down and actually composes something. Music contains a language of its own, a language based in mathematical relationships of timing and intervals and scales and point and counterpoint and harmonies; the list is endless. I remember one of my old friends – not too long ago – talking about the point-counterpoint that they were studying in her music theory class, and the classmates who were making up pieces and challenging each other to “solve” the counterpoint melody. I remember studying canons and fugues and was amazed at the complexity and precision of the various forms and executions.

Now, one is tempted to dismiss this sort of lengthy explanation in favor replying with the simple, “it just sounds good” or “it just makes me feel good” but I want to take a moment and ask exactly what that means. I have always found it strange that music can simultaneously be such a moving, profound experience for a human being and also be so entirely mathematical, so formulaic and so seemingly pedantic. But what is music, really? It’s sound; just sound; it’s abstract; it’s an arrangement of different sounds and repetitions of those sounds in certain ways, ways that have an inherent, independent meaning within themselves and which can be expressed mathematically. So what does this say about human beings? Furthermore, what does this say about the universe itself?

To me this is nothing short of proof of the Divine, or of Divinity itself. The existence of abstract meaning in the organization of particular sounds may be one thing, but the fact that such an organization of abstractions evokes such intensely powerful emotions in human beings is a testament to the divine nature not only in ourselves (that we can recognize it and comprehend it) but to the nature of the universe at large. Not for nothing that Plato, when speaking of astronomy and the Heavens, spoke of the “music of the spheres.” Even as far back as 640 BC, thinkers were recognizing at once the dual structure and beauty of the universe; if memory serves, the ancient Greeks used the same word for “mathematical” as they did for “musical”. Music, then, is precisely this: an expression, in small parts, of the meaning of the universe to a point where it becomes hard for me to differentiate between concrete and abstract.

So what is emotion, then? This is the part where I am venturing into the unknown. How do human beings have emotional reactions to meaning, and not only meaning, but meaning in such an entirely abstract form, a purer form, you might say? To me that can only mean we are meaningful, meaning-oriented beings, caught up in something far greater than ourselves.

This observation always hits me at some point during a concert:
I look around at the faces of the performers (usually the violinists in front) and think about how each one of them has a different life, maybe has family, has friends in the audience. Maybe one of the guys just had his girlfriend break up with him; maybe the girl on second violin just got a new cat; maybe the somber-looking old lady on the viola is worried about her sister in the hospital; maybe the first cellist got fired from his day job. Whatever is going on, whatever happens, whatever concerns or worries or problems the players may have, right then, in that moment, none of it matters. In those moments between when the director raises his hands for the first piece and when he draws his hands to close them in the end, they are caught up in something greater and more powerful. They are no longer the individual, small, worried, tiresome selves; they are parts of a glorious whole, greater than the sum of their parts. In those moments of rapturous meaning, all are transformed by that in which they are engaged. That, I think, is what life means, or Transcendental Life. And as you get deeper in and higher up into it, you start to have a hard time distinguishing between life as a whole and the most intricate symphony orchestra in the universe – some might say the universe itself.

Friday we’ll be tackling Jennifer’s question, on the Most Important Thing In Life.

Until then, may you know the beauty that is meaning.