Music is sound, of course, and that is an enormous universe to occupy. But for me, music is also thought, a way of thinking. Just as we can think of a flower, or a mathematical equation, or a relationship we have with someone, we can also – to coin a verb – music about those things. Not everyone will relate to what we are musicing about, but that’s okay: not everyone shares our way of thinking. In fact, any time one other person understands our thoughts, our music, that’s actually an amazing occurrence, not something we should take lightly.
I gave a presentation on my work yesterday to 30+ composers at the Charlotte New Music Festival, and was astonished once again to see my thoughts communicate, to hear evidence that the way I had presented sounds connected with several people in the room, connections I can make with others in my species that – with all due respect to the many other species who share this planet – simply don’t happen with other creatures.
It matters little to me if these connections are inherent or learned: that amounts to the same thing. We learn what we are inherently capable of learning. And the degree to which any of us have the ability to think through music is an extraordinary cognitive refinement, either way.
A central fascination pertaining to music is how it dwells in the physical and metaphysical worlds at once given our ability to hear sound but never see it, with scents being the only other such phenomenon in our lives. The energies we invest in music sometimes unravel in circuitous pathways. While I have always loved music, my enthusiasm for sports was perhaps more basic at an early age, and it was only after I broke both my ankles playing basketball that my focus shifted primarily to music. I still have dreams on occasion where basketball and music merge into one fantastic entity with myriad parts and aspects woven into unimaginable hybrids.
You have opened up a fascinating subject … music as thought. You cannot imagine how many times in the last few years I have said “abstract art is a language” … at least, as I am using it as code.
The problem, is as you say, “not everyone shares our way of thinking”. For me, the abyss, in all its grandeur lies just below our conscious or preconscious levels of thought. As a 45 year meditator (Transcendental Meditation), I have amassed a great deal of understandings, anyone would be hard put to explain, in the blunt instruments we call words. Our thoughts don’t just start out as words. There is a coming together of complementary and contradictory urges, all of which have their existence in the deeper environs of our being, just beyond cognition. The real work is done just out of sight … in the open-ended arena of our sensing … then presented to our fixed or bounded awareness … mostly whole or complete.
I have often thought I am painting for a people, from a time, that may never come.
A Spanish Jesuit from the 1600’s once said … “not everyman is born into a time they deserve”. His assertion may or may not be valid but it does give one pause. Are we separate … or are we a reflection of our time … or are we, for better or worse, the physical embodiment of our time?
Ron Hartgrove