Thinking About Music
Camille Saint Saens makes me feel like anything is possible. The music drives with such veracity, such life, that you can’t help feeling some great emotion at the sound of it. Sometimes I feel energetic, the way you do after a powerful movie, like you suddenly have to fling yourself forward because walking isn’t good enough. Other times I feel pride that another human could write such music, and that other humans are capable of enjoying it. But Camille Saint Saens has yet to make me sad. Even his Danse Macabre (Dance of Death) is uplifting and exhilarating.
Music is at once so mysterious and so simple. So mysterious because we don’t know why we react to it the way we do. It is only pitches and tones, pace and volumes; and yet somehow it can move us to great feelings, even to tears. And so simple because its affect seems completely obvious, and we cannot imagine music being anything but incredibly powerful.
Music is also so highly condensed. A film can last two hours, a book can last days or weeks, but music needs only a handful of minutes to do its damage (or its repair). Only visual art, which hits us in the instant we see it, can compete with music in the speed of the delivery of its message.
I’ve played music since I was very young – the piano, the trumpet and some other things – but I always preferred listening. In high school I would frighten my girlfriend by conducting while I drove. I imagined that the conductor was controlling the entire orchestra, feeding them every bar with the movements of his hands, creating the song they played as they played it. As such, conducting was a rather physical task for me, and deferred my attention from the steering wheel. Later, when I lived in a small room in California, I would play pieces loud and stand on a chair before my stereo and lead it in a symphony. Afterwards my heart would race and my arms would tingle with the effort.
When I was very young (I say “very” because I think 24 is still pretty young) I thought of pain as sound. That sharp pains were loud and shrill, that dull pains were low and well, dull. And sometimes when I was hurt badly I thought that I actually heard it.