Thursday Thoughts (on Friday)

Why does music have such a profound influence on our lives? Is it because we can articulate our feelings so eloquently when words would fail us? Or because an aural stimulus can remind us of a forgotten memory and transport us back to that moment when your life changed all those years ago? Perhaps the most compelling aspect of music is its ability to change our mood on an almost-subconscious level; music is the wallpaper of our lives. It surrounds and affects us, it can focus our attention or distract us with its intracacies, and with practice, we can choose music best suited for any situation.

Think about the times in your day when there is no music. Even then, the percussion of the water in your shower, your car's tires measuring the evenly spaced seams in concrete on a freeway, or perhaps the rise and fall in the wind outside provide enough aural information that our brains can perceive order in an apparently chaotic world. We do our best to make sense of the sounds around us; this is a learned response acquired during the first few years of life, as we try to define the world around us based on sensory clues. Visual stimulus is perhaps the most easily recognized, but the most pervasive stimuli are aural; an infant has only the same square of ceiling to gaze at in its crib, while the sounds heard by the infant go beyond the crib's boundary, and inform the child that more goes on than it sees.

When you hear a piece of music for the first time, what determines your attitude towards it? Does it remind you of another song? Are its lyrics especially meaningful for you? Does its chord progression elude you? Is it musically interesting? Because humans best learn by analogy, we are more likely to enjoy music that sounds similar to previously heard music we already enjoy. However, wonderful surprises await listeners who venture outside their comfort zone; rhythm, harmony, and melody are universal across all forms of musical expression. Those musicians looking to "create" songs with fresh ideas should keep in mind that there's very little fresh material after 4000+ years of human existence; odds are, someone's shared a similar experience and written music about it. Whatever else music is, for Sinfonians, it is our language.