Where My Heart Wants to Go (spoiler alert: no pictures!)

Ah, Music.

Music is the elephant in the room.

It's the big question in my life.

Is it the love of my life?

Is it the bane of my existence?

The answer is, it's both.

Maybe if I knew why this is, I would be a normal person.

And I could enjoy music without it touching me so deeply that it often, often, is painful.

Sitting here in the shop, thinking about this big elephant, Bob sits in his office, and I can hear his radio playing, soft, background.  He's not hearing it, really...the noise of it, to him, is pleasant, helps him work.

Wow.

That might be nice. Maybe.

Last night was Jordan's Christmas concert at Ewen.  It was a good concert. Things are very different here in the north woods. You see it everywhere. People have an innate appreciation of music.  And they get it when something is good. Last night there were a couple of very nice moments. And people in the audience reacted in a way that showed their sensitivity.  There was a soloist on one of the choir songs who was a surprise to a lot of people and they showed their appreciation for his fine voice.  Another young man really made a song SING with his expert beatboxing, and people reacted in a way that made him know they appreciated it.

My favorite audience thing has always been this, though.  When there is a song that is particularly moving, at the end NOTHING happens.  Not immediately, because just because a song is over doesn't mean that the mood stops there. So people are silent, and then they come back to the moment and the applause starts.  Last night I heard something even more.  After the silence, there was an audible collective SIGHHHH......how cool.

You see, I spent a lot of years trying to create those kinds of moments.  And it was so hard to get there. Serious and insurmountable lack of rehearsal time, terrible performance spaces, inattentive audiences, loud children crying, so so SO many things that could get in the way of spinning that fragile web of sound to create the FEELINGS of the music.

See, I think, there are a lot of people who just don't hear what it is that I am talking about.  That thing about music that makes you stand up and clap in your living room for a young man on a TV competition show.  That thing that makes you sob as you hear 600 young singers capture the heart of the music they are singing. and collectively FEEL it back at you.

I think there are two things that make music feel this way to me. One is just science. The science of what makes two notes or three or seven fit together, or subtly not fit together.  Consonance, dissonance. Some people's ears are just better than others. Some have perfect pitch.  My pitch is a little bit imperfect, but a lot perfect.  It's the reason why my hands will go to different places on the piano if  I try to use the transpose feature on a keyboard.  It's the reason why I feel so uneasy if a piece never quite tunes up, for whatever reason.  It's the reason why I have a physical reaction of some sort when it does. Sometimes involving goosebumps, but often accompanied by tears...what fun.

The second thing is artistic sensitivity.  Kids are WONDERFUL at this.  They feel it without knowing it, and they can emote it naturally.  It's the biggest reason why I taught music for as long as I did.  But it is a fragile web, a thin layer of ice on a winter pond, and anything, EVERYTHING can destroy that mood that is created by the mysterious heart of the music.

An example.  When I was in college, I attended a student recital of a vocalist who sang "Der Erlkonig" (sorry, I can't seem to get an umlaut in Blogger), by Franz Schubert.  It's a story about a man and his son, riding furiously on horseback to escape the King of the Elves, who is trying to take the boy away from his father.  It is a very emotional piece, because the father doesn't believe his son, and then the worst happens, and at the end, the child lies dead in his father's arms. Very moving. Anyway, the vocalist at this recital was able to spin that web, and create the mood of the piece. But apparently, he had performed it so many times that it had become a mechanical exercise. At the end,  after he sang "in seinen Armen das Kind war tot" (in his arms the child was dead), and the piano sounded the last ominous tones, there was silence in the audience.  The vocalist stood with his head down.  But not nearly long enough, because he looked up nearly instantly with a big cheese of a grin and a big bow, so people would start the clapping.  It was one of the most JARRING wrong-feeling musical experiences of my life.  Thirty-five years later, I can still feel it.

Most of the time, I don't listen to music.  It's never something I want in the background, because it is never IN the background for me.  I get swept up in it in a good or in a bad way.  When I compose music, I lose time.  That is part of the LOVE, for me, that FLOW.

I do like attending a concert where there are moments, however small, of that point where the science and the emotions come together to create beauty.  I don't need to be entertained by toe-tapping catchy tunes, and it doesn't matter to me if the music is contemporary or classical or whatever era.  It does have to be MUSIC, though, which is why RAP is never gonna do it for me.

If it is BAD music, badly sung, badly played, with no heart, I want nothing to do with it.  That is part of the HATE, for me.

But, there is one other big thing that messes up music for me.  It's exhausting, mentally, for me, to live in a world of constant music.  My somewhat perfect pitch is an aural mess after evaluating note after note, chord after chord, non-stop.  My emotional self is a mess after subjecting myself to the constant emotional barrage of artistically performed music.

So.

I dunno.

Maybe I am unique in all the world.

In spite of all this, I think music is the biggest driving force in my life.  Never, never a casual love, but an almost obsessive passion.  It truly takes me "where my heart wants to go." Thank you, Cat Stevens, for putting that phrase in my head so many years ago.

So.

Now you know the heart of my strangeness. I think. Or at least one aspect of it. Maybe you can listen to a happy song and understand.  Or not.  Either is okay with me.