Why Music Works

This morning I was talking with some friends about why music works.  I haven't studied a lot of musical theory, so my thoughts on the subject are intuitive and not based on a formal understanding.  But here are a few ideas:

1)  Music brings together differing voices (tones, sounds) that complement or harmonize with each other.  We need to do that in life, too, and it's difficult.  Music shows us it's possible.

2)  Music places moments in sequence in a way that is meaningful and interesting. Our lives, also, are moments in sequence and we want them to be meaningful.  Music demonstrates that they can be.

3)  Music incorporates surprise.  In a song, we're delighted by the new and previously unforeseen thing that arises after other things have led up to it.  In life, we need to handle surprises all the time. Music shows us how we can handle surprises gracefully. 

4) Music is ordered.  It's organized and patterned.  As the the poet Wendell Berry* and others have pointed out, order offers the possibility of rest.  Music makes a convincing case for order, inspiring us to heal chaos. 

5)  Music is balanced.  Music shows us how to balance the lows and highs, the lights and the darks, the points of tension and of release.  We all have both in our personalities and our life stories.  Music shows us the importance of both sides of the spectrum, while revealing the potential for equilibrium. 

6)  Music calls and responds.  There's an ongoing conversation taking place between every song ever written and every previous one, every note that calls to the next, and every singer and every listener.  Music calls us to respond, and we do.  Music teaches us how.

7)  Music brings people together.  Across a room, across time, across cultures.  When our senses are collectively captivated by a song, we feel held within something larger than ourselves. Music surrounds groups of people--not unlike houses, schools and churches--and, in doing so, music helps create community.

8) Music reminds us of our natural, physical rhythms.  Our heartbeats, footfalls and breathing...the regular patterns of night and day, tides, turning seasons, life and death.   Music helps us connect with the elemental facts of human life.

9)  Music moves in a circle.  It takes us somewhere but also leads us back to the starting point.    Though it wanders far from home (say, the starting chord) music tends to come back home in some way.  Much of life is like that.  Music helps us remember. 

10) Music is a gift.  Like the beauty of nature (of which music is a part), human beings did not "make" music, even though, with skill, we can cultivate it for our personal and collective well-being.  In its pure form, music can never be limited or sold.  Music lives wherever there is life.

*The poem "Healing" in What Are People For?  

You Are Not The Song

When somebody says, "Good song!" do you unconsciously take that to mean "Good person"?

It's something we songwriters do sometimes.  Without realizing it, we start identifying so strongly with our songs, that when we don't receive the affirmation we seek for them, we see it as a rejection of ourselves.

Writing a song is about framing your values, fears, hopes, loves and dreams in a three-minute microcosm.  Like life, our songs include light and darkness, highs and lows, moving passages and boring ones.  They're full of tension and resolution.  And eventually every song ends.

When well-rendered, songs are such lovely mirrors of the whole of Creation, we might mistake them for more than they are.

But they are only pieces of the Whole. 

A song--or even a group of songs, an album, a body of work--is only a small, imperfect representation of everything we are. 

When we see that, we can start to offer our songs more freely...without so much weighty expectation. 

Re-orienting ourselves to see our songs in proper perspective can seem, in a way, anti-climactic.  After all, it's thrilling to write a "good song" (which is to say, a well-rendered and faithful rendering of the beauty of All of Life).

But it is the All of Life that truly matters. 

Private Playlist

I'm one of those people who always has a song playing in my head.  Sometimes it's one of mine, sometimes it's somebody else's. 

But either way, it tells me something about what's really going on with me...often something I'm not telling myself, or anybody else, any other way.

Songs show up in the mind without being invited.  They're guests at the door...so, let them in. 

What's going through your head right now?  What does it tell you about what you need or where you're going?  The songs on your "private playlist" offer clues to what your life is really about.  

If you have a gig tonight, you might play a song from that playlist, not because it's your "best" song or "most popular song"--but because it's a song that comes from an authentic place.  (No one else needs to know what the song "means" or symbolizes for you.  The important thing is that you're giving voice to something deep within yourself.)

If you're not playing out somewhere, you can do this at home.  While at work, jot down the song playing in your head...and play it later as a meditation.  Or quickly, without thinking too hard, make a quick "set list" of songs you would play for yourself, right now. 

Not because anybody else is listening.  But because you are.