A Treatise on How I Hear Music
I hear music as as spatial entity. I was finally able to put a finger on this and name it just yesterday. I can feel the physical space that separates two notes from each other, or the timbre of one instrument from another. That's how I know that the guitar is playing a D chord, or that this is the chord progression of a song, or this is how you play this melody on the piano. It's called playing by ear, but that feels like a misnomer. It's really playing by spatial perception; melody as form and harmony as architecture. I can sit and play the very same chorale 15 times, yearning to inhabit that space that I perceive inside the harmonies. I want to sense music with my other five senses (thank you Oliver Sacks), to taste it and see it and smell it and feel it and exist inside of it.
The problem of loving music is the problem of loving anything. The problem of being in love. All you want is to be consumed, whole, by this thing, this entity you love so passionately. When you're apart from it, all you want to do is be near it and when you're near, you need desperately to get increasingly close, so close that you're inside, that you've lost yourself. With people, we make love. We try to shove ourselves into one being, again and again and again, all just to lose ourselves in this other being. But no amount of effort and love can truly merge two into one, and then it's over, and you're as far apart as you ever were. The person might as well be across the world for all we know, the two bodies and souls are so painfully separate.
With music, we play, we listen. We play and play and play, we listen even more, heartbroken at that chord and overflowing with elation at that phrase, trying forever to truly be the music. To get inside of it and to lose ourselves, to know nothing else but what you are playing and hearing, to try forever to become as beautiful and perfect as those two notes sounding. Of course, it's all futile. Just like with sex, we finish the piece and are left alone, and we realize that we were alone the whole time. But there were moments, brief temporal glimmers of that which we keep trying to achieve... time passes, though, and the moment is lost. And yet, it's just enough of a taste to keep us coming back for more, to greedily collect those moments until one day, one day, the moments will turn into our full existence. That will never happen, but we will never stop trying. To be a musician is like being in love with an angel. Music exists in time, we exist in space. Whatever Einstein might have said about the continuum be damned, along with whatever Jesus said about life in heaven: our mortal souls will never bridge that gap.