How are you with Layers?

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One of my favourite things to do is witness people experiencing their passion. Last week I had the pleasure of going to a couple recitals at Trinidad's National Academy for the Performing Arts (NAPA). The first was a Jazz concert, and the second was a classical set. Both were meshed very creatively with a Trinidadian musical  influence and the latter came complete with local spoken-word interludes. They were fantastic. One of the many things that captivated me as I sat in the theatre was the fact that each recital was made up primarily of original compositions, in honour of the country's 50th anniversary of independence. Being an amateur musician, my fascination grew as I considered how well these composers differentiate and organise the layers of sound. Together, there is melody and structure. I thought to myself about how good music takes several sounds and puts them into a context that the listener can appreciate as an identifiable piece. 

I took a couple things from that. When I was in high school, I studied music. The flute was my instrument, but a part of my training involved listening to a piece of music and identifying the number of instruments in it, and if I had a really good ear, naming each. The idea behind this exercise was about being able to differentiate the sounds, and that doing so required more skill than simply listening to the music and acknowledging it as good or even identifying the melody. I understand now that the reason my instructor made me do this was because that is the baby step to composing a piece for an orchestra. A composer takes the unplaced notes and organises them  into not only a melody, i.e. the identifiable format that lets you differentiate one piece of music from another, but also into sounds by instrument. The most celebrated composers have this title because of how well they are able to marry complex sequences of sound into a single musical iteration.

"Displace one note and there would be

diminishment. Displace one phrase,

and the structure would fall. It was

clear to me. That sound I had heard

in the Archbishop's palace had been

no accident. Here again was the very

voice of God! I was staring through

the cage of those meticulous ink-

strokes at an absolute, inimitable

beauty." - Old Salieri to the priest, Amadeus (1984)

I love the above quote from the movie Amadeus; a revisionist tale of the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. If you've seen the movie, you'd know that the character of Antonio Salieri displayed what I would deem pathological jealousy and a consumption of comparison of his own abilities with those of Mozart. He also seemed to have had an oppressive and controlling God-image, but I was thoroughly captivated by Salieri's little monologues, especially where he described his experience of music because they were so descriptive, so passionate. The quote above is a particularly good example of this, as it describes what Salieri saw as perfect organisation in the music he read. As I experienced the recitals last week I listened for each instrument and followed the musician with my eyes and thought that beauty exists in sounds, but the composer's talent is in taking layers and layers of beauty and lodging them together like a puzzle that instantly loses its linkages and morphs into a seamless piece. What could be a chaotic experience of several different sounds sharing the same space becomes artistry when a composer has the vision and the ear to separate and then put back together vastly different sounds. The more layers you can organise aesthetically is the more impressive your composition.


This brought me to my second thought, about whether beauty exists naturally and we simply clutch and organise it, or whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and hence, doesn't really exist at all. Eduard Hanslick and Geoffrey Payzant write on the aesthetics of music, saying that many other forms of art have provisions made for aesthetic quality that fall outside of the consensus of being beautiful. I think one of their points was just that something can be put together really well without being considered beautiful by a large critiquing body. It can be aesthetically excellent because it is a novel use of two or more media or ideas and they work perfectly together, much to the studied consumer's surprise. It can be aesthetic without being subjectively beautiful to everyone. 


I would like to apply these two thoughts to our everyday, normal life because I actually think that as individuals, our goal should be to be aesthetically pleasing over being subjectively beautiful to everyone. If you think about it, the mere fact that people have differing tastes means that to please everyone's taste is a complex and perhaps impossible task, and it also means composing something that you aren't even hearing in your own head. That is, trying to be who you think the world would like best. I definitely see how people end up thoroughly stressed out after months or probably years of trying to compose a self that everyone can agree on as beautiful. I think that people are happier and better adjusted when they try to compose what is already inside of them, the ideas and images, sounds and objects that stir in their hearts. The most celebrated people are the people who break the mould. If you reflect on any public image they are most likely there because they are revolutionary, because they are outlandish and no one has ever seen anyone like them before, or because their talent is obvious - whether you like their work or not. 


So my thought for the week is that people have access to both external and internal layers in all the forms of media and in their own hearts and minds. My opinion is that true happiness comes from listening internally to the stirrings of your own heart, finding the music that other people haven't heard, if you will, and putting the layers together yourself. Tell the world "This is what I heard, and this is what I made with it. I didn't leave anything out, because I wasn't too busy trying to make someone else's music."


"I made my own."