Hearing The ‘Real’ Sound of Music
Dinah Washington delivered her brief but great few lines in a mellow saccour, honeyed by grief and seasoned by moments of trauma and passion that were oftentimes so profoundly pronounced that often it became difficult to distinguish the two. Her vocals convey a medley of poverty in the material and spiritual sense, stirred with a rhythmic tittilation with love and friendship and even a streak of dramatic release of her deep-set anxieties and uncertainties for her life and the product of the time she grew up in. She dishes a dosage of blues in ‘I Can’t Get Started’, a playful gist of drear in ‘Stormy Weather’ and a strongly discomforting, discordant rhythm of bitter tones with a cryptic message of freedom and desire. Dinah communicates in the language of musical vibration that we can relate to on more than just a linguistic level.
We can infer this and so much more by becoming attentive to that which makes music so influential and universally recognisable; its uncanny tendency to speak to the soul on a wavelength that we, on a conscious level, are completely oblivious. Whether it is ailing or yearning, fundamentally caught in the mists of mania or crawling from the caverns of some ravenous hunger for relief, there is no denying the effect of music upon our mood and the vibrations within our body and those excuding from it.
And while reading you are probably mentally representing your favourite song on your playlist, I thought to make one clean distinction clear here and now: music is more than an orchestra of instruments in performance - conversation and language are music in quintessence, creating meaning in spontaneity and range and myriad of modes of expression enunciated with gestures and figurative uses of language. In words and phrases and subversions of language we are in the noble quest of unravelling history and the defining characters whose epic tragedies and triumphs are bequeathed in casual conversation: using language helps us identify our praxis and passport to understanding our own emotions and inferring those of others from their displays, giving way to the possibility of the hyperbolic and the theatrical idiosyncracies that we imbed in language.
Sometimes, when we are sleeping in langour amidst the very breath of our greater struggles, we choose music we want to hear, for the music we choose communicates to us the mantra of semantics and vibrations that we want to ease our ailing feelings. And now, as I have seen the end of a more arduous chapter of experience, I choose to listen to the same music that I had repeated to myself time and time again, preparing myself for the best and for the worst. The sounds of that music are different now, altered by the yields of my experience, and through the music I also discovered a great deal about the patterns and topics of my subjective thinking.
Sometimes, that music follows you into dreaming; forming lucid and amorphous visions of that weight of emotion and anxiety we have carried with us. Perhaps, by listening to music, we can harness its healing power and bring those vibrations into the dreaming and into patterns of thinking. Music, it would seem, is far more powerful and influential than we originally thought.
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