How sweet the sound

Musings

 

Merry Meet again, and Brightest Blessings to all who have found my little corner here at Blogger. Perhaps you are a sensitive spirit, searching for ways to add beauty and harmony to your life. Maybe you are an aspiring writer, musician, poet, or keeper of the flame. Whatever your life's path may be, I hope you will find here positive inspiration, good resources and a generous helping of bratty irreverence as well.

Music is everywhere. Walk into any store, be put on telephone hold, drive down the street at any time of day or night, and notice what you hear around you. How much of it lifts the spirit? How much of it reaches deep inside to a yearning place – a chamber of the heart where creativity and spirituality reside? As a highly sensitive person and as pianist, guitarist and fretted dulcimer player, I have long been aware of the power of music to heal the spirit. Let me give you an example.

In 1974, while living alone in an apartment in DeKalb, Illinois and biding my time in a boring clerical job at the university library, I spent many of my evenings listening to WFMT, the Chicago classical station. One night, like every other night, I had the radio on and was going about my business, when gradually I became aware of a deep peace and an indescribable sense of joy and well-being that washed over me in waves. There seemed to be a pulse of some sort behind it, a spirit healer from some unknown source, and I found I had to put aside whatever I was doing and sit, mesmerized, before the radio. Piece after piece played - everything from Strauss waltzes to Erik Satie’s Gymnopedies to The Desperate Ones from Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. And then, suddenly, it was over, and the announcer said, “You have just been listening to a program of music in three-quarter time.”

I have never, ever forgotten this. I have often thought of writing to the station and asking them if they saved a tape of the program. After that experience, I began to pay closer attention to what types of music are calming, or cheering, or exhilarating.

I'll be writing more about this in future entries. I tend to gravitate toward music that is melodic, circular, haunting, and sung by resonant voices that fall on the melody line. I am energized by choral music and I love acoustic sounds. I find that I'll be listening to something, and I have to jump up and run to my guitar, or to my piano...I have to replicate it. Music is pure joy and will always be my primary passion.

More musings

~ 2 days ago (Views: 1)

I find I have been drawn over the years to music that seems to have the following characteristics:

--triple meter, such as the WFMT program;
--Evocative, stirring melodies;
--Hymns and church organ music;
--Although this would overwhelm some HSPs- exuberant, dramatic music with beautiful melodies and a festive sound;
--Mystical sounds in minor modes;
--Ethereal choral singing and beautiful vocals,especially men and boy choirs;
--Generally, women with low voices and men with resonant voices;
--Melodies that seem to reach deep within and bring forth unconscious memories of childhood;
--Second movements of symphonies and concertos, which seem to be more restful and melodic; (note: I have heard this comment from other HSPs)
--Music played on acoustic stringed instruments; (excluding the banjo)
--Music that resolves, as opposed to stream-of-consciousness music that meanders;
--Music with a drone or an ostinato in the background. I believe this is why Pachelbel’s Canon in D appeals to so many, and why Gregorian chant is so popular;
--Ancient music in unusual modes (scales);
--Any music in the Dorian and Lydian modes. (See Sounding the Inner Landscape by Kay Gardner for a discussion on modes and scales)

Music I find vexatious would include:

--Loud brass instruments, unless it is a clear, pure trumpet solo, accompanied by pipe organ;
--Fast, nervous music;
--Perky Christmas music, such as Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree and the barking dogs singing Jingle Bells in every store and mall beginning before Halloween;
--Chinese restaurant music;
--French horns that sound like nasal, barking dogs;
--rap - the deafening assault of a thumping beat blasting from every other vehicle along an urban street lined with strip malls;
--dissonant jazz, scat singing, chaotic Dixieland bands;
--Tex-Mex music (the type that sounds like Lawrence Welk juxtaposed with Herb Alpert on acid);
--Warmed-over,trite-sounding tunes played cloyingly on an electric piano;
--male singers who can get by with singing off-key (notice how most female singers can’t pull this off and make recordings);
--the shrill sound of a shrieking soprano with too much vibrato;
--squeaking violins;
--the soundtrack to Annie (especially the nasal "the sun'll come out - TEW morrow")
--the newfangled “folk” music sung at churches that sounds less like hymns and more like a combination of show tunes, sentimental Muzak and Irish drinking songs. I attended a funeral once and was subjected to a song that sounded, for the life of me, like a mixture of Dulcinea from Man of La Mancha and Send In the Clowns.

Some types of “gothic” music can overwhelm and overstimulate. I had to walk out of a concert once because the music was loud and frightening. I also have a strong aversion to the soulless, impersonal music played at malls and self-service gas stations –piped in as you shop or pump; sort of an easy-listening and contemporary jazz hybrid with a mechanical, demented drumbeat in the background. When I hear that “music” I feel as if I am being anesthetized, brainwashed into a lockstep trance that has become a soundtrack for our canned culture.