 "Photo: James Heck / The Advocate")
It allows us to say what we want. It allows us to say what we need to say. The words that infect your entire being and prod you to make the biggest little mistakes of your life. Ones you knew you’d make and whose respective self-warnings you so obliviously wrote off. By saying them aloud, first to an audience, then to yourself, and then to that person. The process transforms us and our radius of effect.
From a child’s first experience with percussion through beating its fists on the ground to everyone’s inevitable swan song, music is one of the many lifebloods of humanity.
The influence runs throughout our lives, often defining or helping us remember the moments we so desperately do not want to forget, and often begins at birth.
Association with and involvement in music has been shown to facilitate early creativity and self-expression, perseverance, risk-taking and tolerance of other cultures, according to the Children’s Music Workshop, a California-based education company that helps youth learn and grow through music.
Yet, these development benefits are not limited to children or even people who play music.
A study, conducted by Harvard Medical School professor Gottfried Schlaug and published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, looked at 12 patients left with impaired speech after they experienced strokes to the left hemispheres of their brains. When these patients were instructed to sing the words they were supposed to learn, their verbal abilities greatly improved.
Yet, although there are innumerable experiments conducted with an objective and empirical approach, subjective examples of music’s connection with development can be seen all around.
If you’ve ever watched a child discover a piano keyboard for the first time, you’ve likely seen a human’s first period of spiritual concentration. The way their facial expressions and mannerisms instantly evolve, if only for a brief period of time, indicates that precociousness is not the appropriate term.
The effect is too universal. Everyone seems to have the innate ability to create music to a certain degree.
Part of this is because music, unlike writing which must be channeled through language or painting which requires some form of a tangible canvas and various materials, can often be more directly expressive.
Music is like controlling the atoms around you and crafting a picture out of them. Like taking the world and rearranging a part of it to show others how it looks to you and seeing if they’ve ever felt the same.
Many feel this energy so strongly that they are often able to forgive certain vices they would normally be averse too. This is why it is one of the few forms of art where people have essentially no objection to repeated use of the second voice.
We love singing “you” and imagining our targets. Yet in writing, for instance, we immediately notice any use of “you” and often feel insulted and lectured when we do. The first few lines of this article will likely turn some off from reading any further.
Though writing and painting and all other forms of art are naturally valued for their power over the human spirit, few of them have the direct physical effect of music.
According to www.howstuffworks.com, sound is defined as a mechanical disturbance traveling through an elastic medium. This means that when we feel the deep, vibrating stomp of a bass drum compressing our hearts, it is not just our love of the notes, but our physical reaction to them.
Given this added layer of dimension, it only makes sense that music carries a distinct spirituality among the arts.
In her autobiography “Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey,” conservationist Jane Goodall noted how listening to Johann Sebastian Bach in an ancient English cathedral became a spiritual encounter, albeit one difficult to explain.
“If I hear Bach’s fugue,” Goodall said, “the result is the same: just as the chimes of Big Ben trigger an unconscious spasm of fear, so that music floods my whole being with love, joy, and a sort of spiritual exaltation.”
Like shouting in the rain, music lets us feel what we feel as strongly as we actually feel it. Throughout our daily interactions, we often have to tone down our emotions for fear of embarrassment, ridicule or individuality.
So we sing them. Or pluck them. Or pound them. Extracting them from their corporeal limitations and onto the limitless canvas for sound.
We learn from the musicians’ openness, but remember they are just as guilty as us, struggling with the same problems. We know this, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be recording these songs.
Flowing with the music helps remind us that just because there are no help patrolling boats that putter around and offer assistance without hesitation or request does not mean we cannot swim on our own.
But the greatest benefit, or if you want to be utilitarian about it, the benefit with the widest application, of music is its role as social healer. It reveals what we fear in our relationships and helps us understand how to mend them.
Admittedly, answers are not always offered, as additional rhetorical questions often abound. Bob Dylan alone must be responsible for about half of them.
But at least music provides further impetus and sometimes a final push to help us do what we already wanted to do in the first place — live our lives. And live them the way we want to live them.
Contact Alec Surmani at asurmani.advocate@gmail.com
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