The Golden Age: Inception of Music
*MP3: Memoryhouse - “To The Lighthouse”
I saw Inception last weekend, and like many people, my synapses exploded. Stumbling incoherently from the theater, a mess of blown fuses and frayed nerves, I was left to ponder the power of our latent, nebulous ideas on the lives we live. In the architecture of the mind, ideas are the constructs and we are the architects. We build up entire worlds and destroy them just as easily, both in our minds and in reality. Inception is a very small thing, but as Christopher Nolan has so ravenously demonstrated, fruition is monstrous.
With a little distance from the film, however, I think about its applications to music. What exactly is music? How does it begin in our minds? Where does it come from? Why do certain musical ideas present themselves as appealing while others do not, and why does such taste change over time? Is music an idle, abstract thing, or is it hard-wired into the fabric of nature, into the very strains of life itself?
Hell if I know. But maybe that’s the point. Cold scientific fact looms large over modern times, but people still cling to mystery. As I touched on in the hadron collider piece, it’s tempting to think that music has some sort of symmetry with the universe, that somehow, our concept of music is a frequency dialed in to the music of the spheres. Perhaps the inception of music cannot be explained, or can be explained only after one plays a note on the piano.
Perhaps to explain inception, one needs to travel back to inception and, like Cobb and his team, move past every barrier of consciousness the human mind has built up to the very beginning, the genesis of the idea. Perhaps our ancestors discovered music out of necessity. Perhaps it was a healing mechanism to the harsh realities of life. It described life, but it also took one away from life. It was fun. Some were more practiced in it, or more attuned to it, and thus it became a heavenly gift. Kings had it played at their courts. It became the language of the gods given to people, more lovely and true than any other rudimentary language that ever came from the false tongues of human beings.
Maybe we discovered music, or maybe we stole it from somebody else. Whatever the case, music became many things to many people. We now believe that we can conceive of good music and bad music with little knowledge as to how such qualifications can be made. To some, music is polite, historical, chordant. To others, music is angry and political. Still others believe that music can mean anything to anybody, while some make careers qualifying music as good taste or bad taste.
We make such categorizations, though, without every truly knowing where music comes from. All we know is that it exists. We can’t remember the beginning of the dream, so we try to piece together its meaning from everything that came after. We can influence music in each other, cause secondary and tertiary inceptions of music in each other’s minds, but the origin of it all remains lost. When do we awaken to the true reason music exists? As Christopher Nolan might say, how will we know that that won’t be a dream?
- The Golden Age is a weekly column written by Erik Martz from Minneapolis, Minnesota.
