The Enigma of Music

A Magical Mystery Tour

Larry Carlton's superb guitar solo in Kid Charlemagne by Steely Dan is one of the pieces of music that give me most pleasure. I must have heard it a million times and every time I catch myself dropping what I’m doing and standing there in awe as if it’s the first. I can try and get into why that is, and I can bring up the magnificent technical skills and creativity and inventiveness and choice of tone that Carlton puts into it. I can dissect the solo’s structure note by note, trying to understand the theory behind every lick, or talk about Carlton’s Gibson 335 and the strings and the amp he used and all the settings and effects. And I can say that, sure, Larry Carlton is one of the most inspiring and influential and iconic guitarists of the last fifty years and what else would you expect from his genius and talent -- liking so much such a brilliantly conceived and well-constructed solo by him is only natural. 

But these things, while important and interesting and insightful, have little to do with why that sequence of sounds gives me so much pleasure. I can replicate this exercise with many other fragments of music that I keep returning to for that inexplicable and magical effect they have on me. And I’m sure I’d come up with thoughtful reasonings and ideas and technicalities that would, again, explain some, but leave much out. What’s missing? Something’s happening in the depths of my listening experience that’s hard to fathom. Something irrational and mysterious. And utterly emotional. 

Every time I entertain these thoughts I say to myself that I don’t have to get to the bottom of this: it is what it is and probably there’s no bottom. Some things happen for impossible-to-understand reasons, or for no reason at all, and maybe this is one of them. But I can’t stop thinking about what it is that music touches inside our beings that’s so essential in producing all sorts of experiences. There must be something. Something that makes humans want to create music and listen to it.

Why do we like music? Few other questions are as profound as this. I don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s a mystery that’s so embedded in the very essence of being human that any response would be inadequate or diminishing. Saying that we like music because it makes us feel good doesn’t really capture the complexity of the experience, because each and every one of us hears different things that trigger different emotions with different intensities and different meanings. And the beauty of the experience of hearing music is that it’s unique and universal, simple and complicated, healing and sickening, inspiring and dull, essential and optional, all at the same time. 

Some sounds leave us indifferent, others trigger unexpected reactions and evoke thoughts and states of mind and even influence our physicality. In a recent interview, Brian Eno said that he started experimenting with the Low Pass Filter, a device that “passes” only signals with low frequencies and attenuates signals with high frequencies. He found that just taking off all the high frequencies from sounds has an amazingly soothing psychological effect. “It creates scale, distance, warmth, and a weird sort of intimacy”. Which is quite strange because when we hear these muffled sounds we know that we’re missing a lot of detail, that the “real” thing is much more complete. But he thinks that, for some reason, our brain engages very actively with these low frequency sounds. So he started thinking that perhaps there could be a kind of music where we take existing songs and we just put them through a Low Pass Filter with a very low frequency threshold, like where nothing above, say, 250Hz is audible. “It’s like you’re listening to records being played in another room, so you just have that sort of comforting [muted, low frequencies sound]. You can’t really figure out what it is, but it’s sociable somehow, it’s friendly, like having other people around.” 

There may not be an answer to the why do we like music question, but sometimes I like to write about what a piece of music does to me, what picture it paints and what story it tells. A picture that has nothing to do with the singer/musician/band, and a story that has nothing to do with the narrative on how that piece came to be or what its author was thinking or any technical aspects. I like to think of being under the effect of a certain piece of music, a state where I can create stories of my own. Music is the quintessential story-generation instrument and, similarly to associating words and photos, with music and words the possibilities are endless. But it’s by putting all three together -- words, photos, and music -- that a magical intersection emerges.   

I’m a guitar solo fanatic. I once had a teacher who said that to play a good solo you have to be able to sing it. You hear it in your head, and you sing it while your fingers play it on the guitar. All at the same time. Not easy. George Benson is awesome at that. I was never able to do this flawlessly, but I tried and sometimes I could hear and sing and play simple sequences of notes. And so I get fixated with guitar solos. Some of them summon states and imagery that make me quiver. I know my favorites note by note and I often sing them in my head even when the piece they’re from is not playing. Doing this generates positive thoughts and memories and makes me feel good. 

There’s a beautiful cover of Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing in Sting’s 1987 album Nothing Like the Sun, where guitarist Hiram Bullock plays a spectacular solo. And as I’m hearing it in a loop, I retrieve two photos that this music made me think of, taken a while ago. Photos of a colored sky above a calm body of water at dusk. Two identical photos. The first, out of focus. The second, in focus.

After dinner, he likes to go to his room, lock the door, put his headphones on, open the window, light a cigarette, and look outside. They live in a tall building, on a high floor. From up there, the sea is visible in the distance, a clear blue horizon that he often couldn’t tell from the sky. At age sixteen, he has a head full of questions. What will his life look like in a couple of years, when he moves out to go to college? He’s scared and fascinated at the thought. How much of his current life will he have to give up? He’s fortunate to love his life, but how much of it will he have to leave behind? Will he have to break up with his girlfriend? Will he have to leave the band he’s playing in? What about his friends? Is it going to be easy to be in touch? How soon will he be able to adjust to the big city, if at all? All is unclear, out of focus. In the 1981 internet-less world, life is somewhat difficult, not immediate, very much random, but also sincere and candid and naive. Maybe it’s still a little early to have all these thoughts pollute his mind, he thinks, as music keeps playing in his ears. Maybe he should just enjoy this time and age before things start getting unavoidable. Someone told him that life has this magical power to adjust spontaneously, with pieces falling into place like in a game of Tetris, and that one should just live things as they present themselves. No pre-emptive worrying. “It’s alright, she says, it’s alright. Take anything you want from me. Anything”, goes Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing in his headphones. And a sudden calm takes over, and thoughts soften, some vanish, and a beautiful orange light paints the sky above the sea. Things will happen, and he will be in them, he thinks. One by one. And all is in focus again.     

Infinite stories come out of music, infinite worlds can be drawn and put into words, or into photos. And vice versa. 

But what is it -- what is music? We could say that it’s a sequence of noises, an arrangement of sounds, a patchwork of frequencies. But that’s not enough, that’s not going to do justice to it. The incredibly strong feelings that we have about these noises and sounds and frequencies lead me to think that music is a strictly human experience. In fact, the quintessential human experience. That maybe if aliens landed on Earth and we played them Mozart or Brahms or Shostakovich and then music made by a computer and then music (noise, really) by a group of talentless people who just got theirs hands on instruments for the first time, and asked these aliens what difference they could hear, they might respond that there’s no difference and they all sounded the same. Or maybe they’d hear big differences; maybe the differences that they’d hear have different meanings that are not linked to emotions. Or maybe music as we experience it isn’t confined to humanity. Who knows? When I was a kid they took me to see Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film where aliens land on Earth and try to communicate with humans through sounds. I remember thinking about that for a long time and getting to two major conclusions: 1) music is a universal language, an idea that always stayed with me, one I’m vehemently convinced of to this day; 2) maybe for non-humans music is just a communication framework that does not elicit any emotions.    

Whether or not an overarching theory of music’s ultimate essence and why we make and listen to it exists, we hear very fine distinctions between sounds, and we obviously care about and value these experiences in intense ways. But why does it matter? We clearly can live without music. We can’t live without food or clothes or without communicating with other human beings. There are all sorts of things we have to do, but music isn’t one of them. So why are we doing it, and why is it so universal? We don’t know of a culture that doesn’t have music.    

Maybe what’s important is not music per se, but our reaction to music. It might even be like love -- we don’t know what it is but we do know our reaction to it. It makes us feel connected, less alone. What binds communities together is the knowledge that there are other people who have similar feelings. You might not even be able to articulate them, but you know they’re there. People are ready to define themselves by the set of feelings that they respond to. There was a time in the sixties and seventies where one was either a Beatles fan or a Rolling Stones fan, and they were fundamentally different. They talked about a different kind of person; they presented these two different pictures of the feelings that were appropriate to have about the world, and crossing over from one to the other was a big decision, like a religious conversion. People had identity crises about finding the Stones more exciting than the Beatles or vice versa.

Or maybe it’s all a lot simpler. Maybe we should ask ourselves fewer questions, or no questions at all. And just be cognizant that there’s something called music that has way more power on us than we can possibly imagine, something that can dictate how we manage our emotions and live our experiences. And just let it be. 

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