The Importance of Music in the Human Condition

Photo from sxc.hu

Every few years, a movie will come out for people in the grown-up world. The Big Chill, American Grafitti, Grease, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, American Pie, even Mama Mia!. . .all tapping in to the collective memory of a generation. All of these movies use triggers from the past--clothes, slang, camera angles, and other cultural cues--to remind their audience of days gone by. They also use music.

Lots of music. Sometimes the actual songs, sometimes re-vamped versions from the latest stars, sometimes entirely new songs written "in the style" of the past--but always, music permeates the movie, helping the process of pulling the audience from its present back into the past that for so many is a nostalgic wonderland they wish to revisit. 

Music is one of the commonalities of the human experience. I don't know of any tribe or group that does not embrace some version of rhythm and note. Even deaf communities, who stridently refuse anything the "hearing culture" has that underscores their lack of hearing, play music--loudly enough to feel the beat they cannot hear. Music, like scent, affects non-logical parts of our brain and moves us in ways conscious thought cannot.

What moved that first person to tap on a rock or strum a stretched bit of sinew to make sound? Since I am not a composer, I can only guess by looking at the times I want to hear music. When I am restless, I long for a rhythm to cajole movement from me, to "help me through the panic, till I'm gathered safely in," to quote Leonard Cohen--though I imagine he had a different sort of panic in mind. When I clean house the mess aggravates me unless I am playing raucous music--the tempo gives me the heart to create disorder in the process of organization.

When I am nostalgic, or lonely, or sad, I long for music to fit my mood. Sir Elton is right, "when every little bit of hope is gone, sad songs say so much." The sadness another soul used to write the song allows my own tears to flow. And when I am ambitious, or angry, or exultant, wild anthems, even ones as silly as "We Built This City on Rock and Roll" provide a soundtrack--that odd word invented for music cued to a story--for my own rising feelings.

Of course, there is also love. I feel sure the first song was a love song. The alternating delicate, deep, longing, elemental series of chemical markers that lure us together and make us crave a bond are a primordial soup full of potential music. I sang along with the love (and lust) songs of my parents when I was a child, but I was a full-fledged adult before I understood them. Even as a teen, I had crushes, but never understood the mind-altering affect of emotional and physical longing until later. Now the songs I heard as my husband and I dated and started our married life can erase the years, any petty annnoyances, and send me racing to his arms full of youthful love.

I read an artilce by David Byrne, once of The Talking Heads, who has quite the brain for muscial science. He sees computers creating our music today, and voices calling for "music" to consist of algorhythms organizing sounds of nature without a human composer. "Music made by self-organizing systems means that anyone or anything can make it, and anyone can walk away from it. . . Though this industrial approach is often frowned on, its machine-made nature could just as well be a compliment—it returns musical authorship to the ether. All these developments imply that we’ve come full circle: We’ve returned to the idea that our universe might be permeated with music." 

I cannot be so circumspect. Like my teenage self, a computer will never understand the depths required for music that reflects the most important moments of humanity.  You must experience tears, and touch, and wonder, and awe before you can write a series of notes or stanza of words that will touch the heart of another.

The radio is full of bubble-gum songs put together by corporate conglomerates to manipulate the emotions of distracted people wanting to sing along with something on their commute to a sterile cubicle. I sing along with them myself. Their triteness is the auditory equivalent of a potato chip--you can take in a lot without any feeling of nourishment or fulfillment.

But the songs that are remembered, the compositions that survive for decades and centuries, are made of sterner stuff. To be truly appreciated, they require focus. In our endlessly distracting, computer-driven world, taking the moments to savor the efforts of another mind is a way to ensure we will continue to have music for our life moments.