Oh, Cecilia

[rhythmaning]

I have been struggling to write coherently on the theme of music which moves me since pshtaku first posted on the subject way back when. Since then, almost everyone on my f-list seems to have shared their thoughts - which have made really interesting reading.

I think I have a problem with music - a problem shared with many of you. I like music too much; too much to find any overarching themes. For me music is fundamental: it drives me and calms me; it excites me, it gets me going. Sometimes it makes me angry, sometimes it makes me cry. I am very, very rarely ambivalent to music: it just doesn't work like that with me.

When first prompted to write about this, I started with a list of my favourite tracks; I had to include some artists, whose body of work is just too much to narrow down to a track or two. It is a growing list; it currently stands at about one hundred. It includes a lot of rock, a lot of jazz, and several classical pieces or composers.

Last year, I made a couple of compilation CDs for a friend who wanted to listen to more jazz, but wasn't sure where to start. Each of the tracks I chose, I chose for a specific reason - there were stories associated with the tunes, or with me and the tunes. (I have been meaning to write a post on this for ages; it is almost written; sometime, I shall finish it.) But what really interested me was what I had left out: there were no examples of some important jazz artists and genres, despite these being important to me, too.

So I know that to even try to explain what it is about one hundred (and growing) tracks or artists is frankly beyond me.

Music works at a very primitive level for me. Two of my earliest memories are based around music. I remember seeing the Beatles on tv, a famous film of them performing She Loves You - lots of screaming girls, and you can hardly hear the music; I must have been three and a half (it was definitely before I was four).

Later - I was four or five (I know this because of the surrounding: we had moved house by then), I remember hearing some classical music - my mother must have had the radio on, since classical music didn't really feature much in our household when I was growing up. I have no idea what the piece was - the thought that sticks in my mind is that it may have been a Mozart piece for strings, but I think this is a modern invention of mine, trying to make sense of the memory. What I remember is the way the music made me feel: the strings were melancholy, and the music made me cry. For a long time - perhaps even now - I associated classical music with sadness. (This may explain why so few pre-twentieth classical composers make it onto my list: just Bruckner, really. This isn't to say that I don't enjoy listening to Mozart or Beethoven or Bach or Vivaldi; they just don't grab me in my core. I am not driven to listen to them.)

There are perhaps certain themes. I like strong rhythms (who'da thunk it?), pushing the music forward. My body moves when I listen to music. My fingers click, my hands clap, my feet stamp. (I am just listening to Duke Ellington's famous recording of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue at the Newport jazz festival - powerful, intense performance where Paul Desmond played a long solo of twenty seven choruses [according to different reports, he was either driven by rivalry within the band; or he we trying to impress a woman in the audience] - and I don't find it possible to sit still - the music literally moves me - I just have to clap along.) Like many others I am sure, I don't sing in the bath: instead, I conduct orchestras.

I like big music - big sounds. The classical music I like has large orchestras; I love big band jazz - the sound of all that brass belting out their riffs just excites me. In rock, the sound of amplified and distorted guitars has the same effort.

But I also like spare, quiet music: solo piano works, jazz duets, piano trios.

I have a curious relationship to the human voice in music. It can be beautiful, but I don't really like choral works. I don't like the nature of the classical voice - it doesn't talk to me, it seems a false construct. I don't like jazz vocals, either: for me, the tune is a starting point in jazz, allowing the instrumentalists to fly away where the notes take them. Jazz singers can't really do that, constrained by the word; and the words determine the emotions, whereas the emotion is in the notes of improvised jazz. (There are exceptions, of course; Billie Holliday, whose whole voice is so full of emotion that, however beautiful, it cracks me up; Donald Byrd's experiment for jazz orchestra and choir; Mahalia Jackson singing Black, Brown and Beige to Ellington's gentle piano.) In rock and pop, though, the opposite is true: the lyrics for me are important: they convey the meaning in the song. It is probably fair to say I like clever lyrics; but rock songs need words.

There is something more basic in music too - another aspect, though this is hard to convey (or perhaps even to think about). I believe there is a spiritual dimension to the music I like - it reaches right in to me, and touches me. (This is hard to think about because I don't really believe in the spirit; I can't say that I believe in the soul - but, hey, who said I had to be consistent?) Jazz is a spiritual form, growing out of the slave spiritual songs (at least in part); and improvisation - pure, free creativity - is an artist's purest form of expression.

(An aside: as someone who doesn't believe in god - indeed, who believes there is no god - I find it curious that so much of art in so many different cultures has been created as a result of religious belief. So much of what I love exists because of something I don't believe in. What for me is the pinnacle of musical creativity - of human creativity, even - Coltrane's A Love Supreme - is based around a prayer.)

This is clearly inconclusive. I like all music, aside from that which I don't. Ellington has been quoted as saying that there were only two kinds of music - good music, and bad music. All the music I like is good music; but it is hard to say why I like it. I can listen to a piece of music, and identify what it is that appeals to me - what chords have hooked me, the very key change that sends me soaring - but it is different for every piece or every performer.

Perhaps there are no answers to the question, what music moves me?