Do we love music because melody symbolizes our ability to overcome pain?
At the kernel of all melodic music is irritation: from Schubert to the Sugababes, there is something in music that catches on our nerves and that, finally, we cannot get out of our system. In purely commercial music that irritation is scarcely sublimated: the first time I heard the Vengaboys’ “Up and Down” I almost wanted to scream, the hook was so downright annoying. (The song has since become a favourite, naturally).
But even music of the highest expression, if it depends on melody, is at some level playing on our irritability: Beethoven’s Fifth is an obvious example but the point is just as valid for solemn church music. Or arias, of course. Or Steve Reich.
Now for the other part of the equation: pain.
Anyone who has ever suffered (and I have suffered less than most) knows that pain, on top of being painful, is profoundly irritating. In fact, sometimes one wishes the irritation could be drained away so that we could just get to work on disarming the pain itself. What is that irritation? Probably our nervous system complaining of overload–but also, surely, there is an existential shiver at the intimation of mortality.
Pain warns us of bodily attack: lose that fight, ultimately, and we are dead. Does it get more irritating?
But music, in offering us the experience of irritation not only detached from suffering but inverted into pleasure, offers us a way to redeem our vulnerability:
Pass by! Oh, pass by!
Begone, fierce man of bone!
I am still young…go my dear
And do not touch me!
Flickr image by Gerard Van der Leun
Lyrics from “Death and the Maiden” by Franz Schubert
Thomas Adès continues to dazzle and I only wish, as one who has yet to see or hear his (by all accounts, remarkable) Tempest, that his record label was as prolific as he.