- Ludwig van Beethoven
Music is an entry point to an ethereal, interstitial space where flesh and spirit combine and something mystical happens that can only be cheapened by words. And yet, I feel driven to grasp for the feeble language that may give a taste of my own experience.
I think the term 'mystical' gets closest to the reality of the thing. Lucinda Williams has a great line on her new album that gets at what I'm trying to say: "..down where the spirit meets the bone". Music operates on us physically through our sensory organs (ears, eyes [lyrics, performers], touch (playing instrument, bass surging through your body at a live show) but it demands an integrated engagement with our inner selves. Music is not experienced objectively; rather, it is heard through our own ego/wounding-created lenses. None of this is groundbreaking; everything we experience in life is sifted through those lenses.
But music brings something different. Music is incarnation - it is the mystical Other invading our corporeal self and bringing its goodness. This incarnation, while certainly experienced and shaped by our inner ego/wounding lenses, has an immense ability to feedback and CHANGE those lenses. To HEAL us. Literally.
I should broaden this out to include ALL art forms, really. The same process undoubtedly occurs when viewing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, reading The Poisonwood Bible, watching The Wire, and experiencing the work of a favorite playwright. To each her own, I say.
For me, though, it's music that does the most work - whether the divine beauty of Mozart's 'Great Mass', the mournful longing in Joni Mitchell's 'Blue', the frenetic energy of Bob Dylan's 'Blonde on Blonde', the eclectic darkness of Tom Waits' 'Real Gone', the strident grief on Sun Kil Moon's 'Benji', the isolation of Radiohead's 'Kid A', the lovesick pain of Gillian Welch's 'Time (The Revelator)', the confrontation of limitation in The National's 'Trouble Will Find Me', the struggle for wholeness in Patty Griffin's 'Living With Ghosts', the struggle for self-knowledge in Arcade Fire's 'Suburbs', the defiant brokenness of John Grant's 'Pale Green Ghosts', the danceable murkiness of Wild Beast's 'Present Tense', the search of meaning in Wilco's 'Yankee Hotel Foxtrot', the profound vulnerability of Neutral Milk Hotel's 'In The Aeroplane Over The Sea', or the bombastic confrontation of self in Strand of Oaks' 'HEAL'.
I could continue for a long time, as you might imagine. These artists and their music (and so many others) have fundamentally changed me as a person. I can no longer exist in the world in the same way I was in the days before I first heard Neutral Milk Hotel's 'King of Carrot Flowers Part 1' or 'Radiohead's 'Idioteque' or a thousand other songs. This is what I mean by music-as-incarnation. Some mystical Other has exploded forth from a non-physical space and become intensely, profoundly expressed in my physical body through my changed behaviors. The mystical Other has become flesh.
Last night I saw Sharon Van Etten (signed set list pictured here) play at the Wexner Center. Last week I saw Anaïs Mitchell at Rumba. Last month I saw The War On Drugs at the Newport.
Each show was an intrinsically unique experience; each artist expressed emotions through their own lenses and within their own style of musicality. Sharon's show served as a personal therapy session for both artist and crowd; she married the great pain expressed in her songwriting with the relief of silly jokes in between songs. Anaïs, in good stead with folk tradition, shared songs funneled through the lenses of myth and archetypal pain and worked hard to include the audience as collaborators in the quest for meaning. The War on Drugs just fuckin' rocked out for 2 hours; it didn't seem to matter whether there was an audience or not. Each of these shows will stay with me because they have changed me.
I wish I had a nice pithy ending for this post. I wish I could sum up the depth and mystery of music but I think resisting this desire is exactly what music would have me do. Music is not interested in being summed up; music wants to unravel and take up space for itself and force its way into your soul to such an extent that the two cannot be separated. Music wants, nay NEEDS, to help us unlock the secrets of our inner selves. Music will not rest until every dark cavity and corner of your mind and heart have been thoroughly explored and CHANGED, and this work is never done. Music wants to commission you to live and feel and grow and do everything fully and without self-protection.
Music is roving, restless, and unquenchable. We need only submit ourselves to its mystery.