Briefly, on Music

I want you to think about music. Music in general and any music or song or artist that has stopped you at some point; a melody that caught you, sent chills up your spine and given you an indescribable sense of something so profound, so totally divorced from and eclipsing the subject matter or theme or theatrics or messages or morals of the artist, that it is an experience bordering on the divine, a resonance with the universe catalyzed by external harmonies. I cannot imagine the most unrepentant solipsist, the most cynical nihilist, the most coldly logical atheist being unable to feel this effect which music has always been capable of impressing upon the human consciousness. Music has throughout our history been our balm in times of darkness and our most direct method of shouting our thanks to creation.
But so it is for most things under the sun; today’s ubiquitous technology is yesteryears dream, the sorcery of a dead age. Our cave-dwelling fathers crouched in terror and awe at the spectacle of the lightning storm, imagining vast powerful beings waging cosmic and inscrutable wars. They, in their pioneering innocence and open-eyed wonder, experienced in every phenomenon that same sense of the grand incomprehensible span of creation. So now today we have conquered the night, and caged lightning illuminates the pages we read; while the summer storm has perhaps lost none of its terror for some, it has been exposed, denuded of much of its magic and wonder. So we attempt to do with all our mysteries, all the things which catch us and show us a brief glimpse, behind the scenes, of the life-slick clockwork sorcery which drives our world and us.
It has all been done to music. In the background of every age of our species, running beneath every story any person has enacted here on this brief, tiny stage, there has been music; first heard in the raised voices of primate priests, intensified and heightened by the instruments of our ingenuity, we have been singing with our mouths or our hands since first we had either, and still we have not lost the sense of the infinite wonder of the universe engendered in us by this religion of harmonies.

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