Music Before the Mirror

There is a curious superstition among serious people, particularly those who have suffered the misfortune of reading too much philosophy before breakfast, that music must either save us or corrupt us. It must be a sacrament, a narcotic, a moral solvent, a ladder to heaven, a conspiracy of memory, or at the very least a tasteful accompaniment to one’s collapse. We are not content to let it be sound. We insist that it declare its allegiances.

A melody enters the room and immediately the mind gives it a passport.

“This is sad.”

“This is sensual.”

“This is the music of my youth.”

“This is the music I shall play when I have finally become the man I was meant to be.”

And there it is: the old machinery, punctual as a landlord. A violin trembles somewhere in the distance, a minor seventh opens its little black umbrella over the heart, and before the phrase has completed its journey through the air, one is no longer listening to music at all. One is listening to oneself listening to music. One has made an interior film, cast oneself in the leading role, dressed the memory in flattering light, and appointed the suffering a director.

This is not a crime. It is merely one of the great occupations of the human mind.

The mind is a tireless decorator of experience. Give it a scent, and it will furnish an entire apartment in 1998. Give it a chord progression, and it will revive a departed lover, a lost city, a future triumph, an old humiliation, a summer afternoon that may not even have occurred. Music is particularly dangerous in this respect because it enters without knocking. A sentence may be argued with. An idea may be resisted. But a certain turn of harmony, a breathy flute, the slow rise of a voice over a restless bass line—these can pass through the customs office of reason carrying all manner of contraband.

And yet this power is precisely what makes music mysterious.

For music does not require the permission of thought in order to alter the weather of the being. A rhythm begins, and the body recognizes a law before the intellect has drafted its commentary. The shoulders soften. The breath changes its itinerary. The pulse, which has been minding its own modest business since before one developed a personality, suddenly finds itself in conversation with a drum. One does not decide to be moved in the way one decides to purchase an umbrella. One is moved. The organism has already made its adjustment while the mind is still searching for a phrase sufficiently impressive to explain it.

This suggests a distinction worth preserving.

The body has no interest in becoming a legend. It has no desire to be perceived as cultured, tragic, sensual, spiritual, or commercially viable. It does not lie awake at three in the morning wondering whether the audience understood its contribution to modernism. It wishes to breathe, circulate, repair, digest, sleep, avoid falling down the stairs, and, when fortunate, participate in pleasure without converting it into a dissertation.

The mind, however, is seldom satisfied with such honest labor. It wants a narrative. It wants the breath to mean something. It wants the wound to become a credential and the pleasure to become evidence. It wants music to certify that one is deep, dangerous, refined, heartbroken, redeemed, or perhaps all five before dessert.

Thought is indispensable, naturally. Without it there would be no notation, no instrument-making, no counterpoint, no rehearsal schedule, no score, no tonal architecture, no memory of where the bridge begins, and no way of informing the guitarist that he has been playing the same introductory vamp for fourteen minutes. Thought is a magnificent servant. It builds cathedrals, sonatas, aircraft, and the occasional convincing excuse.

But as a psychological sovereign, thought is ruinous.

It takes the practical fact of memory and turns it into identity. It takes a wound and gives it a title. It takes a passing sensation and installs it as a permanent tenant. “I am the sort of person who is abandoned.” “I am the sort of person who understands beauty.” “I am the artist who must be recognized.” “I am the exile.” “I am the heir.” “I am the one whose music will explain what life has refused to explain.”

And then, having built this delicate little palace of claims, the mind spends the remainder of its days guarding the gates.

Music can become the palace orchestra.

How easily we use it so. We ask a song to furnish our atmosphere, to return us to an imagined self, to make our loneliness luxurious. We turn toward particular sounds not because we hear them, but because we wish to be transported by the story we have attached to them. We do not want the song. We want the man in the song: the man leaning at the window of an expensive hotel; the man crossing a border at dawn; the man who remembers a woman too beautifully; the man who has suffered in an educated manner.

There are worse vanities, certainly. But vanity with a good soundtrack is still vanity.

The question is not whether music produces fantasy. Of course it does. Fantasy is one of its most exquisite shadows. A melody extends a hand toward the unseen. It awakens the images sleeping beneath ordinary language. It opens rooms in us where memory, desire, grief, eroticism, loss, childhood, ambition, and the old theatrical instinct to be elsewhere all sit drinking in the dark. To demand that music should never stir such things would be like demanding that the sea stop producing waves because some of them are inconvenient to swimmers.

The question is whether one can see the image as image.

Can one hear a song and notice: now the mind is constructing a romance; now it is decorating a grief; now it is borrowing the sadness of another age in order to feel substantial; now it is trying to convert a chord into a prophecy?

That simple noticing changes the entire affair.

It does not make music less sensual. It makes sensuality less enslaved to its own narration. It does not banish longing. It reveals longing before it hardens into the sentence, this is who I am. It does not abolish thought. It returns thought to its proper chair.

There may be, in listening, a moment before possession. A sound arrives. It is heard. A phrase rises and vanishes. There is no immediate need to translate it into biography. No need to say whether it is beautiful, whether it resembles something else, whether it proves that one’s soul has excellent taste. The ear is open; the body is alert; the mind, for one rare and almost suspiciously elegant instant, has not placed a nameplate on the experience.

Perhaps this is what pure attention feels like: not a dramatic trance, not a spiritual costume, not the cold abstinence of someone determined to be above pleasure, but a simple intimacy with what is occurring.

A flute tone is not an argument.

It is breath made audible.

It begins where the body ends and the room begins. It is neither entirely private nor entirely public. It leaves the player, enters the air, changes in the space, and arrives in another person’s nervous system without asking either party to explain itself. The sound may carry training, style, history, geography, temperament, and all the accumulated fingerprints of a life. But in the instant of its appearance, it belongs to no biography. It is only there.

For the musician, this presents a peculiar discipline.

One must practice with the severity of a craftsman and perform with the innocence of a child who has forgotten to be observed.

Technique is not the enemy of freedom. Technique is the body’s memory of freedom. The fingers must know their routes. The embouchure must have survived its arguments with fatigue. The ear must recognize harmony not as a chart of obligations but as terrain. The player must absorb rhythm until time is not counted like tax receipts but inhabited like weather.

A musician who has not prepared may speak grandly of spontaneity; this is usually the artistic equivalent of arriving at a duel with a butter knife and calling it Zen.

But preparation alone does not make music alive. One may possess every scale, every substitution, every stylistic credential, every small miracle of instrumental competence, and still produce a sound that resembles a very expensive waiting room. The notes may be correct. The performance may be admired. The soul may remain absent without sending regrets.

What interferes is often not lack of knowledge, but the presence of the self as supervisor.

The self appears on stage in a fine suit, carrying a clipboard.

“Do not miss this note.”

“Give them something memorable.”

“This must be the climax.”

“Show them that you understand harmony.”

“Do not let the guitarist seem more interesting.”

“Make this phrase prove that you were worth all the years of practice.”

At that point, music has become employment.

The player is no longer hearing. He is managing impressions. He is not making a phrase; he is submitting a request for approval. Even ecstasy becomes labor when the ego demands that it be witnessed.

The paradox is that the musician must be intensely present and personally absent. Not absent in the sentimental sense—one does not become a chair, a monkish appliance, or a blank piece of wallpaper with good intonation. One brings the whole of one’s cultivated nature: temperament, taste, memory, injury, humor, discipline, hunger, tenderness, and the strange regional weather of one’s soul. But one does not turn these things into a demand.

The phrase may be erotic without the player needing to become a seducer. It may be sorrowful without the player needing to advertise his wounds. It may be ecstatic without the player needing to wear the ecstasy as a medal. It may be wild without requiring the player to become a public monument to wildness.

This is the difference between expression and display.

Expression occurs when something moves through the musician and becomes form.

Display occurs when the musician moves in front of the something and insists on being applauded for permitting it to happen.