I’ve been finding the writing prompts to be a bit meh this week. Same with this one, however, as I considered it, I thought it was a fun little thought-experiment, especially as someone who is a professional musician.
My Life In Music
Whatever first hooked me on music, the thing that has kept me at it (other than crushing fear of being irrelevant or -gasp- mediocre) are those songs that dig in deep and absolutely break me. Not in an ugly-cry “I can’t access these emotions” way, no, because I’m pretty emotionally in touch. But the songs that change how I see or understand something in my life, that criticize or put a viewpoint or situation into a new light. Or simply that move me, speak to my experience, or otherwise communicate something deeply personal and important. You can get that in the visual arts, however there’s something particular about the performing arts-the unfolding in time. Whether it’s a play or dance or concert, performance arts have a prescribed sequence meant to evoke something (whatever that may or may not be!).
We experience life through the lens of time, even if we don’t fully understand what that is or means or if it’s even real, and music is a chief means of decorating that time. Emotions play out in time. Relationships start and end. We’re born and we live for a time and we die. Time continues. Gravity bends time and black holes exist and even the universe has an end date. Time is, in so many ways, unthinkable. It’s a bit ridiculous, frankly. How can the atomic measurement of a second be different on Earth and in space; but it is. There’s a fundamental absurdity to how much we base our understanding and experiences on time. But I don’t really see a way not to. Even animals are governed by the daily and monthly changes that happen at different times of the year.
More concretely, I made music my profession from a very young age. Without it, I’d still be in debt from college, but without a means to pay it back (as if I can now-haha!). I imagine I might be a school teacher, maybe even have stuck with art. I met my husband making music (actually building musical instruments together-but that’s a different story!). In this little thought experiment, is there space for us to have still met? Probably not, since we were at a music conservatory together. Bummer.
Beauty for Beauty’s Sake
Music calls us to make the most of time the way architecture calls us to make the most of space the way paintings call us to make the most of our view. In the visual arts, the creator might perhaps guide the eye in how a work is constructed, but they cannot force you to experience the piece in only one prescribed way to the extent that the composer or dramaturge can. In a sense, you are free to spend more or less time with any particular part of a painting or sculpture, or taking in the entirety, or back and forth, and so on. I actually really like this about the visual arts, to me it’s less controlling. Composers (especially in the past century) have gotten so so picky about tempos, dynamics, and other performer controls… I think because of the influence of computers, recordings, and electronic music. If they can have it “exactly” as they imagined it, every time, they (often) seem to want only that. It’s taken a lot of life out of music. But I digress.
I think a lot about our lived experience would be missing if we didn’t have music. The absurdity of time, perspective, experience, and pitch all working together to something to our neurochemistry. I would certainly have a lot more time if I weren’t cloistered in a practice room so much.
Actually an Artist 
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