It was my late mother who had unwittingly instilled in me an unfailing love for music. I considered it her legacy which I treasured dearly, but never had the chance to thank her for.
I was the youngest and weakest among my siblings, so she tried to be always there every step of my childhood and early teens. Whenever I was sick, she would cuddle me in her arms and sing to me. Wide-eyed with interest, bodily pain in check, I would listen to her soothing voice. After each song, she would explain to me what the lyrics meant, sometimes adding interesting trivia about the song. It also helped that my entire family was very much into music. We would wake up each morning and retire at night to my father’s sound equipment filling our house with music that provided us with a sense of comfort and pleasure.
My mother had to grudgingly but firmly wean me away from her protective embrace so I would learn to fend for myself. But the desire to know the beautiful stories behind each song never left me. Listening to music became, for me, like reading a good book. As fascinating as the worlds that opened up to me through reading a good book were the emotions that listening to good music evoked in me. I would listen to a song and yearn to know what messages were hidden there. I learned to appreciate the message of the music from any medium — my car stereo, the piped-in music in a hotel, a decrepit radio in a countryside shack, sidewalk beggars performing for loose change. Nothing beats listening to music in the comfort of your listening room with the audio gear you have painstakingly built.
But the audio gadgets that audiophiles use are just tools to enhance our listening experience; they are not the be-all and end-all. They are not meant to substitute for what the music could mean to you and me. Again, just like a book, you’ll get the same message from either a paperbound or a hardbound copy. Nothing can change the author’s vision and genius, be it written on a Jurassic stone, a papyrus scroll or with the help of the word processor of your 64-bit Windows 7.
In Four Seasons, Antonio Vivaldi describes the changing weather using four violin concertos, with each having varied texture resembling its respective season: Winter for instance is sprinkled with silvery disjointed notes from the high strings, resembling the sound made by icy rains. Summer calls to mind a thunderstorm in its final movement. Vivaldi’s creativity in personifying a violin to tell us a story is remarkable indeed.
But in the song April Comes She Will, the changing of the season is described by Simon and Garfunkel through varied metaphors that display their literary genius:
April comes she will..When streams are ripe and swelled with rain; May, she will stay, Resting in my arms again...June, she´ll change her tune, In restless walks she´ll prowl the night; July, she will fly... And give no warning to her flight...
It is in music where artists let loose their creativity, writing about their take on life and death, love and heartache, hope, joy and sorrow. This is why I find it difficult to understand why some listeners appreciate only how a song is recorded, failing to find value in its message.
Now I know how my mother’s penchant for explaining the meaning of each song reveals her deep understanding of how music can be a source of knowledge that can give us an edge on how to go on living normal, if not happy, lives.
Music is pregnant with information enough to keep us either entertained or empowered. It is up to us to pay close attention to the messages it wants to put across. For instance, Kurt Cobain’s mindset days before he died gave us clues to why he killed himself: “I bought a gun and chose drugs instead... I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not. If you die, you’re completely happy and your soul somewhere lives on. I’m not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I’ve got.”
Igor Stravinsky’s musical execution of the fleeting vision of the painter Nicholas Roerich about a pagan ritual in which a young girl dances herself to death gave life to The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky writes, “There arose a picture of a sacred pagan ritual: the wise elders are seated in a circle and are observing the dance before death of the girl whom they are offering as a sacrifice to the god of Spring in order to gain his benevolence.”
I love music because it tells us of mankind’s greatness, failures, heartbreaks... it speaks about life itself.
High-fidelity audio gear reproducing music are but a medium from which music can be appreciated more. The medium is not the message.
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For comments or questions, please e-mail me at audioglow@yahoo.com or at vphl@hotmail.com. You can also visit www.wiredstate.com or you can tweet audiofiler at www.twitter.com for quick answers to your audio concerns.