thinking musically

You know it’s get­ting bad when you have to add things like “blog” or “eat lunch,” or even my classi­est entry “fuck­ing sleep tonight!” to your to-do list.

With the end­ing of UB3, Laura’s show and now my mini art show, I have run out of jus­ti­fi­able dis­trac­tions from the work I’ve been avoid­ing and my life now offi­cially con­sists of only School and Work. A LOT of school and work. Like the amount of school and work that makes you throw up a lit­tle in your mouth. Thus, let’s not be sur­prised that, until grad­u­a­tion, the con­tent of this blog will not likely stray far from a) my eclec­tic and rather poorly cho­sen APU classes and/or b) Chili’s bar and grill. This is gonna be an awe­some few months.

Does it ever hap­pen to you that you learn some­thing new—say, a new word—and sud­denly you are read­ing that word in your favorite mag­a­zine, hear­ing the newsper­son say it on the nightly news, notic­ing that your pro­fes­sor uses it a lot? It almost seems that your learn­ing of that word released it into this col­lec­tive con­scious where peo­ple all around you sud­denly started using it more because you read its def­i­n­i­tion. Well lately it seems like every­one and every­thing around me is talk­ing about think­ing musi­cally. This semes­ter for the first time I am tak­ing an eth­no­mu­si­col­ogy course on the music of Latin Amer­ica and, while I’m not sug­gest­ing that musi­cal analy­sis was recently released into the col­lec­tive con­scious, I am sug­gest­ing that it is a hot topic that I am totally in to right now.

On the first day of my class on the music of Latin Amer­ica my pro­fes­sor asked us—seemingly rhetorically—why every cul­ture and peo­ple group in his­tory has cre­ated music. As we all took a moment to feel impressed by his point, he answered his (appar­ently non-rhetorical) question:

We cre­ate music because we HAVE to. We have ALWAYS had to. Because we can­not pos­si­bly express the glory of this life through any­thing less than music.

His voice cracked as he said it.

There really is some­thing to be said about the uni­ver­sal­ity of music. Vir­tu­ally as long as humans have been known to speak and build tools, they have sung and played instru­ments. Too often, for me, prose or images fall short of what I want to con­vey. I am con­sis­tently left unsat­is­fied, comb­ing my mind for some tool I am over­look­ing that could allow another to really see through my eyes. Sure, this may be because I am nei­ther writer nor visual artist (and sweet god, I am NO musi­cian), but I rec­og­nize a breadth of expres­sion in music that I do not see elsewhere.

Much of Latin music finds its roots in Africa (obvi­ously an import that arrived along with the slave ships) and so heav­ily uti­lizes the bril­liant musi­cal style of impro­vi­sa­tion. In the same vein of jazz and good freestyle rap, impro­vi­sa­tion forces the musi­cian to keep a rhythm, invent mean­ing­ful and clever parts (often lyrics) on the spot, deliver those parts imme­di­ately to the melody, and to engage or respond to fel­low musi­cians play­ing along. My mind is bend­ing even now as I con­sider this. It is no sur­prise that as neu­ro­sci­en­tists only begin break­ing ground on study­ing the chem­i­cal func­tions of the brain, they would devote so much focus to the musi­cal mind. As neu­rol­o­gist and author Dr David Rosen­field notes,

“Musi­cians can learn new visual mem­o­ries and new motor pro­gram­ming mem­o­ries through­out adult­hood. If you want to learn a new lan­guage as an adult, it’s hard. Yet a musi­cian looks at a visual sym­bol and trans­lates that into a motor out­put that in turn pro­vides an audi­tory input. Peo­ple who do that pro­fes­sion­ally have dif­fer­ent brains.

An awe­some study came out a few years ago in the Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can that showed that there was 25% more brain activ­ity observed in a musician’s mind than a non-musician’s when sim­ply lis­ten­ing to a musi­cal piece. Chil­dren as young as five years old were observed to have hyper­de­vel­op­ment of brain activ­ity do to their musi­cal expo­sure in the home. The study con­cluded that music had a bio­log­i­cal basis and that the brain def­i­nitely has a func­tional orga­ni­za­tion for music. So I guess a bet­ter answer to my professor’s ques­tion would be that the rea­son all peo­ple in observed his­tory have cre­ated music is because the human body is made to pro­duce music…it is in our nature.

This holds a lot of weight for me as a non-musician inter­ested in the end­less expan­sion of her mind, as it should for you even as a musi­cian. It is absurd that I do not play.
I am plan­ning to spend a year in and across Cen­tral and South Amer­ica (youshould­come) begin­ning in June 2008. I will reveal details as they emerge. One of my goals between now and then is to really begin to learn a musi­cal instru­ment. I’m con­sid­er­ing percussion…maybe the Marimba or (more likely) the Steel­pan.

I mean, can you imag­ine what it would do to your mind to play in the pan yards of Trinidad and Tobago?

holy sweet jesus.