On Music

Wednesday morning and my fingers run on the computer keyboard while in the background Yo-Yo Ma is performing miracles on his cello with Bach’s suites. I cannot hold back a melancholic smile, remembering a part of my youth which I put aside for the past ten years, but which lately keeps bugging me to revive it – some of you may know that I used to play the piano years ago, but few know also that at some point I decided to give up music and literally sold my piano. It doesn’t matter why I did it – back then it seemed like the logical response to the circumstances. I won’t say that I shouldn’t have done it – an action isn’t defined only by the doer, but also by the reasons that caused it, and I’m not here to justify my reasons from back then.

However, I can’t help missing the flow of feelings through my being while my fingers used to play fragments of the souls of Bach, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Mozart, Beethoven, Prokofiev and so many others. As I told a friend of mine at some point, there are moments when the vibration of a piano chord is enough to bring tears into my eyes.

Therefore, today I’m talking to you about music, about this splendid, but still far from being completely understood, part of our life. For what is music, after all? What happens to us when we listen, almost as in trance, to the organized sounds played or sung by someone? Be it classic or modern, vocal or instrumental, music always fascinated people, and they never ceased to strive to comprehend and conquer its amazing language, without realizing that it was the language that was conquering them, and not the other way around. Men tried to subdue this world of the sound, tried to impose rules to it, tried to fit it into shapes, forms, organized it in systems based on various criteria, but in the end, no matter if the rules are respected, if the form is an old or a new one, music transcends all the artificial organization and we find ourselves completely ecstatic in the presence of sounds. Music conquers us, and once it does so, it owns us for life, whether we’re aware of that or not. Why? I don’t know. Some say it’s because music is the language of god. Others say it’s because the frequencies of music resonate with our own frequencies. But does it really matter? The truth is, no, it doesn’t. Music simply governs our hearts, in one of the most splendid ways possible.

Yes, music owns me. It always did. It always will.