The Way Fayer

What would your life be like without music?

By my definition, lifeless. Though maybe we should start with the fundamental question … what is music anyway?

Music is usually defined in relation to sound. Look up the definition of music, and you’ll get this: “vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.”

Not altogether wrong. Quite accurate even, or at least fair enough. But it’s not comprehensive.

If we started thinking to ourselves about the greatest musicians or composers of all time, we would certainly have to include Beethoven. After all, in the history of music fewer have been more instrumental (take the pun or don’t) in bringing attention to the beauty contained therein. Except for one thing … Beethoven couldn’t hear.

How on earth could one of the most influential musicians of all time have composed such lasting melodies, all while not being able to hear the notes he produced?

I take from this that music must mean more than just sound. For someone to properly seduce the receiver of the Eustachian sensations—or to tickle the eardrums just as they would like to be—surely that person must know a thing or two about music.

Could Beethoven feel the music in his fingers as they stroked the keys? Could he taste it on his tongue as he licked the sweaty air? Could he see the music skipping from piano to stage, stage to audience, and audience to rafters?

Most reasonably, he could not.

What, then, could he possibly have done to recognize the beauty of his production, to reproduce new variations that would speak to people across generations?

The answer is obvious. He knew music. This means that music must go far beyond our mere sensations.

I will go as far as to suggest that all we have, and all that we are, is music.

How could you be any more beautiful, you wonderful, mysterious, and peculiar production of this unlikely melody that we call life? There is a part of you deep within, deeper than the sharpest eye could possibly see, making its own music as a universe to itself, holding within it all the memories that it can bear to hold and making a song for each—whether or not those songs will ever be heard by another.

I will, however, say this: the music you have, the music we share, bears a weight as big as the world and as little as you. It’s one that wishes to be heard by others, even if you can’t hear it yourself.

How strange (and at the same time obvious) it is to realize that the music which formed our existence, the music that started it all, somehow has a place in bodies that remain our own, wondering what all of this could mean: music that can’t hear itself.

I think maybe this is because music isn’t meant to be understood; only experienced, expressed, and sought after. Beethoven shows us that we don’t have to hear the music to get it, that we can know it even if not comprehensively.

So I encourage you to find the music and hold onto it. Without music, we have only our bodies—but with music, maybe we can last forever.

(To find the music, find a quiet place, sit still, and focus on the innermost part of your being, the part that receives the sensation and controls your body—the person you are when everything else goes away. Or just listen to a good song. Then, follow about the implications.)