People think that the rhythm of life doesn’t include the music, if they think about that at all. One of the things that I thought about, and tested against the times with my ears listening to hear the underlying language of the music, was if there was a pattern to the sound of the music that was considered “hit music”. The notes of a melody are clearly designed to be expressive of the voice and voicing of the singer, but the music that plays behind a vocal, or the music itself if it is a symphony, are played in language as well. Sometimes that language is specific; sometimes that language is musical, built from the accompaniment and the “rules” that go with accompaniment. There are the “theory rules”, which aren’t really rules at all, more like guidelines which help musicians find the muse that was in the writer or to become the muse when they are writing a “response” to a call. When your ear can hear the language, it can start to explore the music, and the intention of the writers. Pieces that are more musical have a hypnotic effect, being tied to a rhythm, but as anyone who has the heard the exploration of rhythm which is in the Japanese Taiko drum or the African chant knows, the timing of a beat is also or can also be a language, so accompaniment of a rhythm can be a language hidden in the music.
The question I started to ask myself is “when do we start speaking English”? I ask this because in some cases I can hear it in the music, but in some cases I don’t hear any language at all. I began asking this question a very long time ago. It was part of hearing symphony also; what about composers who never spoke the language of the people for whom their work is being played? Is the music translated by the score or by the feeling of the translation, or by translation?
A few summers back I went to hear Herbie Hancock & Lang Lang play with the Los Angeles Symphony and I heard a classical piece which I “translated” as being about a certain story – I then found out what conditions that the symphony had been written under. I might have been right about what the composer was “saying”, I had the right story, but it was a story based upon instrumentation, not language, it was based upon the use of instruments in a particular fashion to express a certain emotion and a certain movement of the social culture upon which the piece was a commentary. That was for me a symphony performance that was realized. Even sitting high up in the Hollywood Bowl, I could feel the transcendental emotion of the music as a “hurricane”, which is the emotional goal for most composers.
My question about language came from a disconnection in other cases because the interior language of the music is not in a language that I can hear – and so emotionally, I have difficulty attaching to “that emotion”. So I always wonder, “when are we going to talk in [“ “]?” The facility to learn to talk in music is ‘someplace in time’, and too often encased in corporate money expectations that limit reaching out. For years I have heard the same silence about the question, “can we talk about music”?
I came to believe that part of the equation about language in music is a matter of the education and desire of the musicians. For me, it is a great accomplishment to know how to write transcendental music in your native language, but there comes a time when that is “easy”. When it is easy to play and write with a voice, it is time to study with a voice. That voice is not just the language of the music, both the music language, but also the culture language. We learn to communicate across culture with music through the rhythms and the spoken language voice which we add into the music.
I had a teacher/friend who used to say that when he was travelling he was always silently proud of himself when he was asked if he was from a certain place – a place he might have recently been, where he knew and spoke the native language – and was asked if he was from [“x”] because he had their accent in his attempts to speak locally, even though English was his native language, and the other languages were not. His was an example of someone who knew how to dive into the culture without falling away from his own personality. That he generally looked like Einstein didn’t hurt ….
What is disappointing me more than any temporary state of affairs I might find myself in today, is that while reaching out to find out if I simply missed the educational opportunity or if it was not there, I have seen how wonderfully value creating expanding the reach of music can be, but it’s so sad, because I wonder if it was the last dollar was spent ….
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