The Soul Speaks

As anyone who loves music can attest, there are moments when you can be transported to a different level of consciousness by performing or listening to music.  It is an unselfconscious moment when there is heightened awareness and a profound depth of appreciation.  In Japanese painting, the concept is called “ukiyo” which means “floating world” in English.  It is a time where the mind loses touch with mundane daily responsibilities and becomes engaged in something different—something beyond the moment and, at the same time, completely within it.  

Music is an activity in time, unlike a painting which can be experienced in a few seconds or observed over a much longer period.  For the sake of illustration, please consider music as a two-dimensional graph, with time on one axis and experience on the other.  Normally we move along the time axis and experience what is at the intersection of time and experience at any point in time. There are, however, moments when the motion of time seems to stop and we are free to experience a single point in time in a new way, moving up the experience axis.  It is a transcendental moment. The soul speaks.

The late Ross Wetzseon, a longtime editor of the Village Voice, once wrote a review of the Whirling Dervishes of Turkey, whose hypnotic circular movement he called “an emptiness filled with everything.”  He went on to describe the experience this way, “the transfixing serenity of ceaseless motion...the revolutions revealing that the center of a circle is synonymous with the whole. Timelessness has its own rhythms.”  

I vividly remember the first time I heard “Thanksgiving” by Charles Ives.  The piece, which is about 15 minutes long, is full of drama and mystery, building and growing, culminating in a hymn, sung to the tune of Duke Street, “God! Beneath thy guiding hand.”

"God! Beneath thy guiding hand, 

Our exiled fathers crossed the sea, 

And as they trod the wintry strand, 

With prayer and praise they worshipped Thee."

I was literally holding my breath as that tune was sung.

I can’t say I have had many of these experiences in my life as a musician, but when I do they are always unforgettable.  Last Friday at 6:00pm my talented young piano quintet came to my office to warm up before their concert later that evening.  They tuned their instruments and started to play the last movement of the Schumann Piano Quintet in E Flat Major.  As they played, I began to realize they had never played it better.  They were completely focussed.  They were free of self consciousness.  They were making music. I had to remind myself to breathe when they were done.

When we are transported that way by music and human endeavor, it is an evanescent moment. And when we return to everyday life with its multiple headaches and stresses, I can only hope we bring something back—something that is life affirming—something that proves that, even if it is only a moment, life can be perfect.

                                                                                Lawrence Davis