Anam Cara

ending of a previous one . . . Everything that prepares a future

creates rhythm; everything that begets or intensifies

expectation . . .

SUSANNE K. LANGER

MUSIC ARISES FROM THE REALM OF SIMULTANEITY. IT TAKES US TO a level where time becomes a circle. Here one thing does not follow another in a regular line of sequence. Somehow at that depth, all times are present together: the joys and losses of your past, the wonder of the present and the unknown possibilities of the future; music plays out of this profound simultaneity. This is why often when one listens to Beethoven or Bach, one feels one is being cradled in a sublime Now; there is no ‘before’ or ‘after’, ‘otherwise’ or ‘elsewhere’. Here memory and possibility come together in an invisible embrace. Music draws us into transfigured time through the sonority of distilled feeling. Music is the most immediate of presences; it infuses the whole self, and is at the same time utterly elusive. Yet it is impossible to be definite about music. It creates its own time and cannot be measured by seconds or minutes. It also creates a new space that cannot be measured by inches or metres. Music dwells in a world of its own.

I remember a night of music in Piazza San Marco in Venice. There was an international dance festival. It was the night of a full moon. Out on the ocean a storm was raging. The sea was rising fiercely and frighteningly in and around Venice. The orchestra on stage were playing Stravinsky to an accompanying ballet. Somewhere in that evening of music everything came together in a magnificently charged way: the ocean, the dance, the music, all of us caught in a dark, elemental surge. The music brought everything into one seamless circle of being. For a while we dwelt inside the music, were embraced and protected by it. For a while there was no ‘outside’.

M

USIC

I

S THE

D

REAM OF

S

ILENCE

And harmonies unheard in sound create the harmonies we hear

and wake the soul to the consciousness of beauty.

PLOTINUS

IT IS STRANGE THAT ALTHOUGH WE CANNOT SEE OR TOUCH MUSIC, it evokes and creates such a clear and sure world. Especially at orchestral concerts, I have often been struck by the question: where does music actually dwell? I love the ritual and form of a concert: how the conductor evokes a fluency and harmony from the diversity that is an orchestra; how the soprano soars to meet the music; how the audience and performers are affected and enfolded in this invisible force. A deaf alien would be amazed at our gathered attention and unity. Though we cannot see music with the eye, many musicians speak of seeing music with their inner senses; they see shapes of flow, shapes of structure. Some see music in their dreams appearing as forms or patterns. A friend once had a dream of seeing her Sufi teacher walking into heaven. She vanished beyond visibility; when she returned later there were notes sticking to her limbs like bars of light. For a while she had been walking in that other land where the stuff of music grows naturally!

There is a sense in which music is a homecoming. As we slip below the surface mind, below the flotsam of the surface world, we travel to our true level, where the deep silence of identity, that silence that holds the mind in poise, is reached and embraced by music. Like the flow of some primal wave, music has the confidence of an originary force. Once evoked, it knows where the deepest source awaits. Ravel said: ‘Music is dream crystallized into sound.’

Music is the surest voice of silence. From the beginning silence and sound have been sisters. Music invites silence to its furthest inner depths and outer frontiers. The patience in which silence is eternally refined could only voice itself in music. Music and silence are like lovers who gaze at each other and long for each other. Schubert once said: all music begins and ends in silence. Indeed, the secret of Schubert is how he sculpts silence with sound. The dream of silence is music. Though the content may be full of sorrow or pathos, music seems to desire a certain lightness and playfulness; physically as sound it continues to move and flow. Perhaps listening to music renews the heart precisely for this reason: it plumbs the gravity of sorrow until it finds the point of submerged light and lightness. Listening to music stirs the heavy heart; it alters the gravity. Unconsciously it schools us in a different way to hold sorrow. When the music is dark it works through dissonance and harsh notes; like underpainting their beauty is slow to reveal itself but it does ultimately dawn. It frees a space to let in lightness. Unlike anything else in the world, music is neither image nor word and yet it can say and show more than a painting or poem.

W

HEN THE

L

AND

G

ETS INTO THE

M

USIC

We have fallen into the place

where everything is music.

RUMI, ‘Where Everything Is Music’