My Wonderful Affliction
I 've just finished reading Oliver Sacks' latest book, Musicophilia. Sacks is famous for writing interesting anecdotes about the brilliant and the strange people whose peculiarities and mental anomalies help illuminate the mind for the rest of us.
I've said for years -respectfully and only half-jokingly- that living with music is a bit like managing a disability. I need to accept it, build my life around it, find resources to care for it, manage it, be careful not to overdo it, and all that.
Sacks' writing makes it clear that music, at least for many people, is a kind of disorder, or at least, sometimes goes hand in hand with disorders of the mind. It can moderate other disorders; it can even outlive language and memory. People who can barely remember their most recent moments can sing whole suites of songs from the distant past. It is a poignant fate, that of the constant musical present tense.
In still more horrific cases, people are afflicted with what seems to me the worst disorder of all: the inability to hear or understand music as an emotional vehicle. They just hear sound, stripped of all value, all nuance, all glory. This seems to me an unthinkable state of loss. I would feel like the child victims of those ghastly experiments in the Golden Compass: as if my soul had been torn from me. It is unimaginable.
Reading Musicophilia cast some light on how an ordinary person like me might have wound up possessed by songs, as I have been since my very earliest days. Like people with Williams Syndrome, I have an affinity for music that is out of proportion to my abilities to play it. Knowing that, I've always downplayed my skills as a musician, even as I've laboured at the craft of my many instruments and voice. Yet I realized, reading Musicophilia, that one of my little disorders of the mind is deemed by many to be a rare gift, rarer even than the deftness required to play: I can compose melodies. I always have, and honestly, I thought everybody could. Apparently not.
"Compose" may be too strong a word. I just... hear them. I have since I was a child. And once I hear them, I cannot forget them. I can sing you the melody of the first tune I ever thought of, walking home from the last day of school in Grade 3. I just have to tuck the tunes into rhythmic, rhyming words, and miraculously, those melodies are preserved within them forever for me.
As I've grown as a songwriter, I fancy that I've learned to hone this gift. With regard to space, and to rhythm, I have had to work really diligently to expand my awareness and tune my instincts. That's been as much, or more about listening as about playing. Yet as my ability to handle music has grown, I've developed what Sacks hints is an even rarer facility: I awake in the morning with songs fully composed in my mind. Sometimes, they're just melodies, but if I hum them in the shower or scribble into one of my journals, my morning notions may form a complete song in just moments.
This is not, in my view, composition. That's what "real" musicians and composers do. This is transposition. I don't know where the songs come from, whether they're better or worse than any others, or why they choose me. But I am glad they do. Songs are the true children of my dreams, often of dreams I cannot even recall. They haunt me like the loveliest of ghosts.
To give them life in the light of early day is my musicophilia. It is an act of joyous abundance, the glory of many a morning, and one I always greet with deep grattitude. It is a truly wonderful affliction.
I've said for years -respectfully and only half-jokingly- that living with music is a bit like managing a disability. I need to accept it, build my life around it, find resources to care for it, manage it, be careful not to overdo it, and all that.
Sacks' writing makes it clear that music, at least for many people, is a kind of disorder, or at least, sometimes goes hand in hand with disorders of the mind. It can moderate other disorders; it can even outlive language and memory. People who can barely remember their most recent moments can sing whole suites of songs from the distant past. It is a poignant fate, that of the constant musical present tense.
In still more horrific cases, people are afflicted with what seems to me the worst disorder of all: the inability to hear or understand music as an emotional vehicle. They just hear sound, stripped of all value, all nuance, all glory. This seems to me an unthinkable state of loss. I would feel like the child victims of those ghastly experiments in the Golden Compass: as if my soul had been torn from me. It is unimaginable.
Reading Musicophilia cast some light on how an ordinary person like me might have wound up possessed by songs, as I have been since my very earliest days. Like people with Williams Syndrome, I have an affinity for music that is out of proportion to my abilities to play it. Knowing that, I've always downplayed my skills as a musician, even as I've laboured at the craft of my many instruments and voice. Yet I realized, reading Musicophilia, that one of my little disorders of the mind is deemed by many to be a rare gift, rarer even than the deftness required to play: I can compose melodies. I always have, and honestly, I thought everybody could. Apparently not.
"Compose" may be too strong a word. I just... hear them. I have since I was a child. And once I hear them, I cannot forget them. I can sing you the melody of the first tune I ever thought of, walking home from the last day of school in Grade 3. I just have to tuck the tunes into rhythmic, rhyming words, and miraculously, those melodies are preserved within them forever for me.
As I've grown as a songwriter, I fancy that I've learned to hone this gift. With regard to space, and to rhythm, I have had to work really diligently to expand my awareness and tune my instincts. That's been as much, or more about listening as about playing. Yet as my ability to handle music has grown, I've developed what Sacks hints is an even rarer facility: I awake in the morning with songs fully composed in my mind. Sometimes, they're just melodies, but if I hum them in the shower or scribble into one of my journals, my morning notions may form a complete song in just moments.
This is not, in my view, composition. That's what "real" musicians and composers do. This is transposition. I don't know where the songs come from, whether they're better or worse than any others, or why they choose me. But I am glad they do. Songs are the true children of my dreams, often of dreams I cannot even recall. They haunt me like the loveliest of ghosts.
To give them life in the light of early day is my musicophilia. It is an act of joyous abundance, the glory of many a morning, and one I always greet with deep grattitude. It is a truly wonderful affliction.
posted by David Newland at 28.1.08
1 Comments:
I too share your affliction and dread the day when I am unaffected by it. Music is truly the food of my soul and I too have been awoken many a night by a melody or sense of a melody. I have a limited ability to actually play a few instruments much to my frustration; none of them well enough to express the true beauty of the haremonies that I hear in my head.
I too have melodies and harmonies heard in my childhood trapped in my head, they are (un)fortunately taking up space that could perhaps be (better) used for things that other people consider important - like math. Though, I use music daily, I rarely have a need for my limited math skills - go figure! I can't recall the last time math saved my life, music, however, does it every day.
If musicophilia is truly a disorder, check me into a facility and let's get the straight jacket out right now, because I have no desire to be healed - ever. Happy to see I am not alone in my insanity!
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