Good afternoon ladies and gentleman

So i am aware that my poor scheduling has made my posting a little hap hazard this week. Nonetheless what i was away doing makes for an idea of how hundreds, thousands and in cases even millions of people have the capacity to come together and jump, dance and sing at the top of their lungs, when in normal circumstances a lot of these music fans may have never crossed paths throughout their lives.

This is best described by going to a gig, or a concert based on what type of music you were into. Going to a gig is a  wholly immersive experience, where the whole “modern society” and the issues that so often come with it seem much less…relevant. Throughout the vastness of needing to be liked, worrying about what people think, the general exhaustion of being convinced that we should all be running towards a goal, an end result where this “perfect ideology” will reign free, no matter of the cost of the potentially brilliant, beautiful moments of right now. The moments that can make your hair stand on end, the adrenaline flows through you, the unique wander, proof that we capable of so much if we choose to see the possibility of life, love and everything in between.

Yet we ignore this potentially outstanding feeling the majority of the time, for the “frivolities” of modern life. A major exception to this seems to be during music. Generally speaking, there isn’t such thing as “bad” music in my opinion, just music that gives me that feeling of brilliant wonderment, adrenaline pumping euphoria that makes energy feel boundless, possibilities seem endless and worries seem so utterly meaningless. If certain types or pieces of music make you feel good, it doesn’t make other music bad, it just makes the effect on us different, away from the pleasurable “freedom” we are familiar with. It doesn’t mean we should limit ourselves to this music, far from it in fact, as per the power of connectivity music has.

Last year there were festivals all across countries throughout the world, where thousands and even tens of thousands of people in certain cases all turned up and went to dance about in a city centre, at a racetrack or even just in a random field. Why did they do this? I’m confident they all did, as did I, go and be uncomfortable camping, in the rain, mud and the cold, because they love the music they had gone to see. Why do people go to gigs or festivals? Buy albums and listen to them over and over again. Musicians can sell millions upon millions of albums. so surely what they are talking, rapping, singing or shouting about must be making an impact somewhere, somehow.

The connections that music can make for you proves how wonderfully capable we are of becoming intertwined into other people’s lives, through a shared fascination with the effect music can have on you. Take, for instance Mozart’s 11th Piano Sonata. When you listen, the way it effects you is profound, it gives you a positive sense and feeling in your life, not interested in the parameters of what you are supposed to be defined by, only by the way you feel right now. You write about it, you think about it, even something as simple as hearing someone listening to same music, or going to an opera, gig or to see an orchestra play that symphony you fills you with such raw emotion it feels like nothing else.

Consider this. Almost accidentally and without even realizing, we have become connected to a collection of other people, all from different walks of life. They may live in different cities, or even a different country to you. Yet if this music event had not taken place, that beautiful moment in your life would have never happened. The connections you could have developed with the people who feel so powerfully because of music, would have never happened. They could have lasted a minute or for the rest of your lives, but imagine what it could have done. I like to believe music can give you a remarkably close connection, if not to the people around you be to your sense of self in who you are and who you want to be.

I think the best way to explain music is the unique sense of freedom it gives us. Put a number of notes together, be it through the strings of a piano or along the frets of a guitar, in that moment, it is all that matters. We gain connections purely through the pleasure of how the music makes us feel, while we remain at that moment unphased in what you do for a living, how much money you make, what car you drive and what career prospects you have to move up in a company you weren’t interested in being a part of to start with. Yet, i digress…

Its very easy to be convinced that modern society feels disconnected, as if nothing matters to us on a more meaningful level than “i bet that would make me look good.” Yet it seems we, as we often do, have been giving ourselves a hard time. We have, without really noticing been living more to the ideas we desire, the raw emotions music can make us feel and the connections they allow us to make. However, i feel like the world is trying to bite back at us , create an environment where we don’t feel anything  that we aren’t supposed to, work for the “greater good” at the detriment of our wonderful uniqueness and the connections that make us feel so outstanding throughout the “Gig of Life.”

I wrote something a few months ago called “The Connections Puzzle” and only to now see that music could quite easily play a critical role in the connections we want to make with people, if we allow music to tap into who we are and who we want to be. We could quite easily ignore what music does for us, as it does for everyone else and stay in our little box. However i wager that this is far from the point of music, for it should be making us want to feel something, otherwise…its just words shouted down a microphone or noises coming from a collection of people playing instruments. Without the connectivity that music can give us, music kind of becomes obsolete.

Do you agree? What is your take on music? How does it make you feel?

Yours, with love as always.
DR

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