Music and Thought

During the intermission of a concert, someone once asked me, “What do you think about when you listen to music?”

Now that’s a really interesting question. Most of the time, we don’t think about what we listen to. It’s entertainment; a pleasant noise in the background to keep our minds from wandering, not to help it wander. So when I started reflecting back on the last forty-five minutes, I was surprised to find it not so easy to uncover my own thoughts. I’m not used to thinking about what I thought. I just think, and feel.

But, in a concert, we finally have a chance, consisting of a space and a time, to really savor music. We can feel it resonating in the walls, we can see it making the people around us nod and sway. We can see firsthand how it affects even the person or people producing the music. We can predict the music, be surprised by it, be moved by it. We can, in a sense, almost converse with the music.

So, what do I think about when I listen to music? For me, it is like listening to a masterful orator, someone who opens you to a universe he has discovered and to which he means to transport you. What do the stars say to you when you look at them in the night sky? They don’t say anything to me… but they convey a lifetime of wonder to me. I usually don’t know what a composer really means to “say” with his music, but, as with a great speech, it’s not what he says that matters so much as how he says it. The way it opens, the way it flows; the way the music plays with itself, asking questions and posing answers. Sometimes it says things desperately, insistently; sometimes calmly, solemnly. Sometimes it answers with precision and certainty; sometimes with unease and drama. The way it might let its intentions be known, just enough that I can nearly predict the music and almost feel to be conducting it myself; or then the way it surprises me and takes me somewhere new I hadn’t even imagined existed. The way it tenses me in my seat, then lets me breathe. The way it brings to my mind images of all different kinds, images of mountains and forests, paintings and statues, forms and faces, personalities and sayings. The way it seems to find in me a memory, distant or recent, like a magician finding something out of nothing. The way it presents it to me, explains it to me, discovers it to me. The way it reveres me, humors me, fights with me, dances with me.

I could give many examples of my favorite musical works that really exemplify, to me, this way of engaging with the music. The first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1, Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, the Spanish Dances of Granados… but the experience of this “musical dialogue” rests as much as in what the music has to “say”, as in what you have to say with it.

The way the music dances with my humanity is what I think about when I listen to art.