Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Three centers, one being

I've been wondering what it means to say that the three components of music -- rhythm, harmony, melody -- conform to the three centers of self -- body, heart, mind. Do we enter into a relationship with a piece of music that is an analogue to a relationship with another person?

Everyone gets it that tribal rhythms attach to sexuality, and move the body before they move the mind or heart. Exuberance -- the body's tension and release captured and known -- is the drill, and ecstasy the desire. The other night I saw a wonderfully exuberant Afrobeat band, Lagos Roots. Here's a video:


I'm clumsy these days, and while I like to move my body to the rhythms of live music -- always have -- I don't relate it to the dance of two people, the call and response of dancing with someone. In fact, when that is asked of me, I'm clumsier than usual. Confused. I was talking to a stranger at the Lagos Roots show at the New Parish and because we were naturally moving to the beat it suddenly became a dance. I was embarrassed and didn't know what to do when she became even more embarrassed. Now the physicality, the exuberance, was being transposed into a call and response, and it stopped being simple, selfless and contained. Drama appeared. How peculiar. But no question: there's a link between the body, musical rhythms, and the sexual component of relationships.

Melody for me is heard almost totally by the mind. I start with Paul McCartney and those big, leaping intervals that are sweet, friendly and stripped of ambivalence. These are unfiltered thoughts being transmitted directly from one mind to another. While Paul is pretty good at attaching labels to the thoughts -- Michelle is a person, Yesterday a time -- the melody exists as its own idea, created by a mind for other minds. There's something absolutely brilliant about a beautiful melody. When we sing along, it's out of memory and head and a kind of truth that the mind wishes it had all the time, undistorted and unified.

Whatever a melody is, it is unmistakable. In college I was a Charlie Chaplin fan, and owned several versions of the song Smile that he wrote for his movie Modern Times. I ran the school Film Society, and that meant I was the projectionist, so I got to preview the movie and show it twice and then show it to myself or friends again later. That melody became part of me for a while. Nat King Cole's version is the gold standard. Imagine my surprise a couple of years later in grad school in New York, going to the Met for Puccini and hearing the melody of Smile -- all of it except the last down note -- tucked into the middle of an opera. I'm pretty sure it was Madama Butterfly, but it could have been La Boheme. We remember melody well, because it can be more easily stored in mind than rhythm or harmony. It's from there, after all.



The melody is the bright parts of a relationship, or the low points. It carries the drama with it, and the stories and memories and ideas that accompany friendship or love.

Which leaves us with harmony, the heart. Oh dear. Here are textures of grief and joy, cold spells and the warmth of vulnerability and exposure. A few years ago I saw the quietest concert, an hour and a half of spellbinding harmony by Joao Gilberto. Here's another performance of his:


This, to me, is all heart. Something happens between the guitar and his voice that has little to do with musical notation and melody, that is beyond the chords. Maybe it's in the achievement of a blended bunch of sounds and projected feelings. It tells me that his heart is tender and unguarded, but reluctant to join the shiny, loud world.






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