Judith Bishop – whose poem, 14 Weeks, is being set to music by Jane Stanley for Composeher – writes about the power of music in the following essay, A Short Meditation on Music and Meaning…
1
Towheaded is the word that comes to mind to describe him. He had tufty pale hair, as if he had come out of the surf or a shower, mussed his hair with a towel, and it had stayed like that. All the children were assembled in three rows. Their item for the end of year concert was Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’. They readied their claws. This boy and a girl were each given a microphone: the two selected talents of the class. But when the boy began to sing, you could see immediately how much his heart was in it. A studied nonchalance was there, but the pleasure and effort were evident too. He was embodying the music. Anyone could see that – he was not just performing it; he was singing himself into being.
Schools and choirs choose these songs for our kids: anthems to self-realisation, paeans to success through struggle and dream. They are meant to take root in the marrow of our children, and they do. They are meant to be a wind blowing hearts into the future, and they are.
Halfway through the song, something started to unravel. He was singing too well. He had made himself visible. More than that: in his passion he was naked. No doubt that’s why it happened. A boy behind the singer held two fingers over his head. The boy sensed the gesture even before he looked around. Perhaps he knew it had to come. Words were exchanged; he glowered at the other boy. He remonstrated, weakly. A few other boys joined in the fray, tossing words, sotto voce, in his direction, microphone dangling in his hand. The girl sang on with the class. Then the song ended, and the boy ran away into a classroom to hide his nakedness. I felt a deep disturbance; I wanted to speak out. To ask the principal, Did you notice what happened? To say to the boy, Don’t let them stop you singing. To the friends I was with – I just saw a small murder.
2
Music has a way of giving people a sense of life’s potential. It’s not for everyone, but for some, it is irresistible. I think this is why I felt so deeply for that boy: he was tapping into this. How odd that at the present time in history, just as we have come to understand the biochemical bases of life, we use the word potential both for that intangible sense of possibility, and the electrical energy created in our bodies by biochemical processes – the energy that animates life.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes used the word animate to describe the singular effect that an encounter with a photograph could have on his mood: ‘In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it.’ What is animated has the breath of life in it, and in Barthes’ formulation, gives life to the one who is moved. In this sentence, he pinpoints the feeling we often have when we listen to music. There may be specific moments, in certain pieces only, that lift us and fill us with a fierce sense of meaning, even as we cannot express it in words. For myself, these are moments I desire to share. I want those I love to feel them as I do; even knowing (and I do) that this cannot quite be done. Barthes remarks à propos of this, in parentheses – though what he says is essential, not at all marginal, for he was very cunning – ‘(life consists of these little touches of solitude)’.
3
I began this morning with a song. Fleetwood Mac recorded ‘Sara’ some forty years ago, but it was many years later when I first encountered it. Today, it took some effort to keep the song going – Stevie Nicks’s voice, the backing vocals, instruments – all of it together. I had to pay attention to the singer’s pitch and timing, and when she wasn’t singing, I followed the other parts until her voice re-entered, neither sooner nor later than the track suggests it should. It wasn’t the whole song, but only those parts that struck me on first hearing – the ones whose private meaning was as clear and moving to me now as then. Memory, we know, is both active and passive. I worked together with mine as if it were a friend, mending the places where my memory was patchy, until the whole gave me the pleasure that I sought. Then we started over. And over again.
4
Miming the vulnerabilities of a strong passion, the lyrics to ‘Sara’ swing in great arcs between love and loss within a single stanza: ‘Sara… / you’re the poet in my heart… / Never change… never stop… / But now it’s gone… / It doesn’t matter what for… / But when you build your house… / Then… / call me… / home.’ The words are a skeleton that holds and shapes the physical aspects of the music. I can’t read the lines above without hearing the pauses and the chords between each phrase. Those pauses allow each word and each phrase its full weight. Each lingers, holds, releases us in time for the next.
I think, too, of the bright, string-like twang of the keyboard. How to describe that sensation, the delicate meaning caught by a certain timbre? Or the way the notes rise in the opening keyboard riff? Some deep-seated metaphorical impulse says a rise equates to hope and aspiration. Towards the end, though, there’s a downward key shift and a very subtle slowing of tempo, almost like a gear change: ‘In the sea of love… / Where everyone… / would love to drown… / But now it’s gone… / They say it doesn’t matter anymore’. And so the mood is altered. Many pop lyrics oscillate rapidly in just such a way, between words and musical elements that describe, and elicit, an elevated mood, and others that convey disappointment, loss or resignation. In so doing, they recreate, repeatedly – in the space of a handful of minutes – one of life’s most powerful emotional cycles.
5
When I was six or seven, curious about my inner experience, I asked my brother, ‘Do you hear recordings in your head?’ When he said he didn’t, I realised I was different, though in a way I liked: one of those discoveries a child never forgets. Since then, I have learned that many of us ‘play music’ in our heads. Not a lot of mainstream writing – notable exceptions include Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia and Daniel J. Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music – seems to speak to this experience, extraordinary as it is: the way we conjure music, with all its textures, its timbres, its timing and its sweetness, in private, within our mind’s ear.
I observed the way a song, ‘Sara’, acts upon me, both when I hear it played and when I play it in my mind. But if you listened to it now, how would you hear those elements? The sensation of the music is, of course, private to your body and mine. ‘Shared sensation’ is a poignant oxymoron; perhaps the most poignant. And yet, there is something that communicates itself. A creative intention is captured by that confluence of tempo, key shift, intervals, and lyrics. If not for that intention and the insights that it holds, one piece of music could not move so many listeners.
6
‘Little touches’, Barthes called them. In music, these touches can be a fine detail, and yet, they are no less affecting for their scale. The Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin’s ‘Unsent Love Letters’ is the title piece on an album composed in tribute to Erik Satie, whose unrequited love affair gave rise to those letters. It has one element in common with the opening of ‘Sara’: it repeats – with variations – certain groups of rising notes. Like metre in poetry, these patterns create an expectation of continuity – a backdrop against which any change is evident. But here, the top note jumps a little higher than expected. And there, the second in a pair of notes is lower than the first. Now the pitch in each pair is falling, not rising; the pattern is reversed. It is repeated only briefly, then the rises return. And I struggle to say how, or why, I am moved by these changes. Barthes, similarly troubled, observed ‘the pressure of the unspeakable that wants to be spoken’.
The accounts that I reach for are blindly metaphorical. The high notes seem to me to grasp for something unattainable – like a child stretching up to pluck a star, they fall back empty-handed, with a child’s melancholy. As for the falling pairs, the only word I can think of to describe them is acceptance: that gentle lowering upon a bed of resignation – respite – rest. The unsent love letters folded and closed in a drawer.