Music as the Imperative. 9.27.2009

I can’t listen to music with a straight face. I react to music more strongly than I can conceal; ferociously, irrationally. When I am listening to music, every texture, attitude, chord or bassline demands a response. I’ve spent much of the last decade trying to approximate on paper even a weak description for my reaction to music. Words cannot express the brute force of the musical moment during immersive, focused listening, and any description would trivialize the totality of the effect. This is the most solitary of my experiences. Although we attempt to share the experience of music by playing in bands, dancing at clubs, sitting in concert halls together, and listening to it on street corners, and though we form communities in appreciation of celebration of its unifying effects, the shapes, the winkings, murmurings, nurturing and furious machinations of music are still one of life’s most intimate and personal experiences. Music can only unleash itself on the world and when I am alone with sound, physically and mentally immersed.

I know that once when I was sixteen, a couple milliseconds of a bright ringing in an empty concert hall at the end of our performance of Holst’s First Suite in E Flat for Military Band once completely annihilated any and all of my life’s experiences to date. There have been a handful of subsequent experiences equally as striking, which I cherish above many other memories and experiences.

The only way I could possibly begin to describe it is to suggest that music ‘dissolves the world’ with its energy. It’s as if the effect on my brain of sound in motion turns the world transparent. The material world dissolves into an intangible, a resonating vibrating surface, a pulsating more real and more true than anything else. During music, I see ‘through’everything. Music’s shapes and textures transform the present into a lush shimmering so intensely beautiful that it sometimes even hurts, and and I find it difficult to breathe. This experience is the fuel for my optimism, the glue that holds my discrepant pieces together, the fabric of my days. It is my deepest insanity, the secret gift my synapses have handed me. Music’s effect on me defies explanation and distorts my priorities because it subverts rational experience. Obsessive, ravenous listening has become a way of life.

Drowning out me, and the world in sound, I grin, smirk, even gasp - when the tune ‘clicks’ and the sounds melt everything and everyone. The waves of chills, the bursts of energy, the peak experiences, the shapes and motion, can ‘happen’ to me no matter how many hundreds of times I’ve heard a song before, and even on the first euphoric listening. At the right moment and with the right sonic experience, the sheer positive force of the sensation is often almost more than I can take. It’s an irrational explosion of beauty and happiness, during which anger and ecstasy can coexist, one that tears through the fabric of the present. The synergies in music are the manifestation of totality, and everything about life and the mind experienced all at once. It leaves me thrilled at least, and breathless at best.

As a clarinetist, I was notorious for moving excessively as I played; I swayed and dipped with every phrase, rising and falling with the contour of each melody. It was impossible to play music without embodying the sounds I was experiencing through constant movement. When engaging with and listening to music, I am reminded of who I am, where I’ve been, and what I’ve done. Music is the only way I can construct my self, the only method I have for organizing the chaotic slop of impulses, emotions and thoughts constitutive of ‘me’. Plugging my brain into an ipod or satellite radio, I can bounce, drive or stride harder and harder through the fabric of the world, into the utter nothingness of a world of pure sound. I am always in search of this; the perfect soundtrack, the ecstatic mesh of sound and self, this merging of material and immaterial. Even walking down the street, or at the gym, with terrible low quality earbuds that don’t fit into my ears quite right, and that I constantly push deeper into my ears so the sound will be more full, the world dances with me and pulses and gnashes its teeth. I set my musical raygun on destroy, and my head bobs. I jump and I scream and I lose myself because I am the sound.