The Energies of Tone, Harmony, and Cadence: Musicality Book Club, Week 4
As we move past the heaviest chapter of Bridge of Waves thus far (Music as Mind) and now meditate on Music as Heart, it seems quite fitting that I am now experiencing a compelling need and desire for rest. This chapter has some wonderful thoughts about the feeling of leaving and returning home, and being presented with a journey or puzzle and then rewarded with a resolution. Here are a few quotes and reflections for this week. I look forward to hearing your thoughts, so please leave your comment below!
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Organic and Created Patterns Through Pulse: Musicality Book Club, Week 3
Last week, we delved into Music as Body (Chapter 1) in Bridge of Waves: What Music Is and How Listening to It Changes the World. Time for Chapter 2! This chapter, titled Music as Mind, discusses at length the philosophical, practical, and technical aspects of musical concepts like pulse, tone, meter, interval, scale, key, melody, harmony, and polyphony. Those unfamiliar with music theory may glaze over in some spots, but gradual familiarity through multiple readings should do the trick and may be valuable in making some connections previously unthought of, both intellectually and emotionally.
Although the more mathematical and technical aspects of music are definitely interesting, I find myself drawn more to the parallels of music in nature and humanity. Both the former and the latter are at once patterned and unpredictable, and it’s the tension between the two that makes life so beautifully comfortable and mysterious at the same time. In the context of music, and pulse (i.e., the beat) more specifically, Mathieu draws out some of this tension by discussing how pulse (what he often calls periodicity) manifests itself organically. What I like about much of what he writes is that he tries to reveal the naturalness that exists beneath the complexity of music theory. Let’s read a few of his thoughts on periodicity:
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Music in the Body: Musicality Book Club, Week 2
We’re now on Chapter 1 of Mathieu’s Bridge of Waves: What Music Is and How Listening to It Changes the World, which is tantalizingly titled Music as Body. This chapter is a nice segue from the introduction last week when Mathieu and I wrote about how the upper and lower body connote spirituality and groundedness (read last week’s post here). Before we go further, let me just give a quick update: By request, I will now be including page numbers at the end of quotes from the book in case you want to go back and find the appropriate section; feel free to do the same in your comments if you’re quoting something new from the book. Okay, let’s begin…
My impression is that Mathieu’s biggest intended take-away from this chapter is the idea that music is energy that comes from within the body rather than outside of it. He writes of the harm to this idea by modern society’s specialization in the field of the music among others:
…music has largely become, for most of us, a commodity made for mass consumption and manufactured by specialists. We don’t make music, we buy it… When the resonances of music are experienced as traveling from out there to in here, we become estranged from the rhythmic and harmonic states that arise naturally from our own bodies. One of the hard truths of my own American life is that it’s been decades since I’ve heard “Happy Birthday” sung in a restaurant in tune. What has happened to us?…
[O]verall, we know better how to consume music that how to physically participate in the making of it, and the trend of specialization continues. So as an individual in a society remarkably cut off from its own music-making body, how does one go about making the body connection? [pp. 4-5]
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