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Sometimes I wonder whether we as a race have undermined music over the years. Music used to be something you relished on its own ages ago, just a person performing in front of an audience and nothing else. Yet when was the last time you listened to music and did only that? Its always accompanied by something, jogging, reading, sleeping, working etc.
All that thought brought me to the act of reading, strangely enough. Reading has remained something you do exclusively, mostly because it requires your complete involvement. You have to look at it to read, concentrate to understand and imagine the words and what they interpret. Sure there is a cursory way to do it, like say the way you browse through a magazine, but true reading is still something you spend time doing.
I’ve written in the past about Resonance on this very blog, and it was under one such occurrence recently that these thoughts struck me. It made me think that we are missing out on a lot of things that music has to offer simply because we don’t LISTEN any more. To put it in a different way we don’t read, we browse.
There are groups who still do listen for music sake, take the classical music concerts for instance. There are no theatrics, its a groups of people looking at a handful of people sit and perform, no weird lasers, no pyrotechnics, nothing. But thats a small percentage of music listeners and an even smaller genre of music overall.
In moments of Resonance, the most innate things about a song strike me. Things that would otherwise go unnoticed, like the faint riff of a guitar in a piano heavy song, like the background vocals and harmony, bass lines etc. Made me think that there are so many layers to music, that in a cursory browse get over looked, all you notice is the striking aspect, the booming vocal or the guitar solo, but you miss the environment, all the other little things going on.
I had written previously that I don’t know what causes this Resonance that I talk of, and I still don’t. But all these thoughts made me think that perhaps I can come close to the feeling if I spend time and just listen to music and do nothing else. Just me my earphones or my giant speakers and a chair. If any of what I said struck a chord with you, maybe you should too.
