Musicking

Tonight, I was reminded of the reason I came to music in the first place. It's likely the same reason I love Catholicism so much--transcendent collaboration that's both ephemeral and incredibly far-reaching. It's that moment when you fall into the pulse of a piece of music, so much that you feel the performer, your fellow audience members, even the composer, perhaps, breathing and throbbing along with its musical heartbeat. Suddenly, in that quasi-miraculous instant, you're connected to the piece--to its history, its creation, its many (or few) iterations, and to every person listening to it now and in the past. You're a part of humanity, of creation, of the beautiful, creative life-force that's been singing before speech existed (or so Rousseau claimed, at least).

Recently, I boldly horrified my young DB by telling him that I didn't believe in the transcendent properties of music--and perhaps I don't. I'm not convinced that any literal parallels exist between one person's experience of music and another's. The major sticking point of human experience is that it has the potential to be so very subjective. After all, we're all quite trapped in our frames, receiving data and having it translated to us. Who's to say that my translation system isn't radically different from yours? That my blue isn't your red, or that my apple isn't your orange?

Even if I'm not convinced of the literal homogeneity of human musical experience (something spanning across that much time and space is bound to be pretty disparate, in my estimation), I am convinced that it's individually important. Similarly important, at least to me, is the perception of shared experience. I want to feel that I am a droplet of water falling into an ocean, losing my boundaries as an individual in the sea of humanity--even if I'm not sure, on a rational level, that the sea exists.

It occurs to me that, while reading some of Wagner's writings earlier this week, I was frustrated by his tendency to reference his concrete experiences so abstractly in his thick prose. To avoid hypocrisy, let me be more concrete. Tonight, I watched a portion of a streaming concert online, and seeing that concert spurred the creation of this post. The idea of participating in a concert as an internet observer of a streaming feed has gobs of implications for mediation and technological questions that I'd love to approach at another time, but the distanced participation I did enjoy was sufficient to inspire an outpouring of musical fellow-feeling, as well as an avid desire to attend more vast, utopian festival concerts.

That's what I want from my music, be it Beethoven or Mumford and Sons--I want the feeling that comes from inhaling the same breath as a man on a stage with an instrument. The physical sensation of my body attuning itself to the music--from tapping toes to catching heartbeat. The searing, almost palpable exchange of love between fervent listener and earnest performer. Knowing (or imagining, at least) that everyone around me is breathing that breath, feeling that love. Imagining that they, too, are imagining me communing with them.

If everyone imagines together, maybe we are achieving some transcendent unity?

Nah. Sorry, DB.