Observations on Music

I once thought that because I could sing, read some notes, and play an instrument, that I understood music.  Not so.  A child thinks he understands a Slinky toy, but all that’s really understood is his enjoyment of it, and perhaps that it doesn’t work uphill or is not functional once it’s been overstretched.  At a minimum, I at least thought that I knew what music I liked.  After all, it’s pretty obvious when one first tastes a chocolate ice cream scoop that he’s partial to it over his first asparagus spear.  But tastes change, and experience evolves one’s understanding.  And that process never ends. 

 In this sense, music is an “unperfectable” art.  But it is also a deep science that could absorb a lifetime of work to fully comprehend.  Both of these attributes of music - - its art and its science - - are not products of chance (as if anything could be!).  Music is certainly rational, structured and logical, even mathematical.  But at the same time it is shapely, powerful, beautiful and moving.  Of course, like any art, it can also be disorderly, chaotic and ugly, but that is only the result of abusing or misusing the gift.  And so there it is.  The word.  Gift.  That’s what music is.  Whether it is simple sounds in nature such as a bird singing or complex symphonies generated by the composition of human beings.  Music is a gift from the source of all art and all science.  From God Himself.