Ordered Fairness

The Nature of Musical Form

 

It is hard to believe of the word that there should be

Music in it; these certainties against

the all-uncertain, this ordered fairness beneath it,

the tonelessness, the confusion of random noise.

 

It is tempting to say of the incomprehensible,

The formlessness, there is only order as we

so order and ordering, make it so; or this,

There is natural order which music apprehends

which apprehension justifies the world …

                                  William Bronk

 

This is a poem I could have written, but no matter that William Bronk beat me to it. I have certainly lived it and what matters is yet another insight as to why music, which seems so frivolous and dispensable and unimportant (talk to your local school board), is so vitally necessary. Whether music’s ordered fairness is entirely fabricated by the human imagination or whether it reveals a deeper order surrounding us, but invisible and inaudible to our inattentive selves, isn’t particularly important. What matters is that when wholly attentive and immersed in music, the chaos of the world is brought into a comprehensible clarity. Not only do musical rhythms enervate our muscles and invite them into the ordered response of foot taps, finger snaps, hand claps and dance moves, not only do music tones soothe our nervous systems and vibrate the inner strings that create the inner motions that evoke e-motion, not only that musical harmonies create the tensions and releases that tell the stories we are built to hear, but that the very forms of music sing of a world that makes sense and gives us a moment’s release from the confusion and commotion and messy unruliness that is much of our daily life. That alone is worth the price of admission.

 

When my friend at The Jewish Home ends each music session exclaiming,  “You’re wonderful!” (thus, insuring my perpetual return!), what she’s really saying is “How wonderful to have an hour each week to forgot this failing body, this increasingly jumbled mind, this painful awareness of clock time leading us all into a frightening unknown. For this one hour, we’re out of time, out of our bodies and letting the notes from the piano unscramble the mind’s jumble and bring it into an intelligible lucidity.”

 

I believe we can all use some more of that. Hail music!