Everyone has heard that "music is my life" cliché. Everyone. And I think that a lot of people today would identify with it, thus making it the glorious cliche that it is. But what a great cliché to have. Because, yes, a song can because an anthem for a revolution, but it also works on an everyday scale. It can make can otherwise mundane Tuesday afternoon feel like you are in a scene from your favorite movie. Or like when you discover new music and your entire world seems to be changed in a subtle but grateful way.
Music makes us time travelers. When you listen to a song that you haven't heard in years, it can bring up memories of places and people you thought you forgot about. And that might either be a good thing or a bad thing, but it has the power to do that, to take you back to a place where you were a different person. Back to when you were more optimistic, to when you loved things just because, to when you were sure that you couldn't make it though this time, back to when you found out just how good your friends are at feigning sobriety, to when you knew that you could be heroes, just for one day. Music has a way of putting so much more meaning into words than you thought possible. Words sound so much more beautiful sung. Or you can listen to an instrumental and hear all of the things that the composer had in mind for you to experience. One of my friends described it as "it's soul crippling – but in a good way."
I remember sitting in my choir class at 9:30 in the morning listening to my choir director define what music was to him. And it was an eloquent and elegant in itself. And while the other students took turns giving their own definitions, I remember thinking that that was the first time I truly tried to understand not only what music is but what it means to me. Until that point, music had been just something that I wanted to be good at, something to pass my time on a long drive home. But then, my choir director played for us a song called "4:33." It is four minutes and thirty three minutes of written silence, the only sounds are the unintentional sounds made from the audience; coughing, the sound of someone adjusting their seats, whispers thought quiet enough that no one would hear. And I don't know what I was supposed to take away from it, but this is what I concluded: Anything and everything, is music.
My new choir director has us singing a song called "Lux Aeterna." The composer is said to have been trying to write about the way light would sound.
Everything is music.
