musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music


I’ve always loved music; when I was very little, I learned that my maternal grandfather did as well: every Saturday without fail, he would turn on an opera broadcast on the CBC radio. It wasn’t called Saturday Afternoon at the Opera as it is today: CBC Radio has been carrying the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts since the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s creation in 1936, as did its predecessor, the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission which began airing the program in December 1933.

My love -although sadly not my talents- grew from that I think. Still, over the years, I came to understand that the performance of music was not required for its appreciation. I have never doubted that, but I’ve often wondered if it would ever be possible to explain the hold music has on most of us. I happened upon a thought-provoking philosophical essay that goes a long way to explain it to those who wonder at the magic however.[i]

I mean what turns a series of seemingly meaningless sounds into music -or, as the author wonders, ‘how silence breathes between sounds’? Well, the answer seems to be that the sounds are ineffable and too beautiful to be described in words. And no, I don’t think that’s a get-out-of-jail answer. ‘The essence of the ineffable seems to coincide with a linguistic excess: what remains after every attempt at translation, when nothing is missing and yet something has been lost. Something resonates beyond words, setting them in motion without ever settling into them. Meaning presses against language until it breaks its surface, like a wound that cannot be sutured. Beyond words’ contours, a shadow persists, present precisely where language fails.’

I love that way of putting it, and especially when she quotes the poet Emily Dickinson’s similar rejoinder, although I think she is talking about songs:

‘A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.’

Indeed, music is in constant motion and ‘cannot be trapped within a grid of words.’ So, if at first you don’t understand, keep listening… Different cultures may choose not to define music as we do, but it is still music, still ineffable to each of us. ‘Silence and a proper measure of irregularity are what turn a meaningless sequence of sounds into music. Music cannot exist except through those absences that allow it to breathe -no matter the culture… The ineffable dimension of music resides in the gap between saying and not saying. Music neither states nor conceals. It hints.’ I love that.

And where do we come in? How do we come to know it as Music? ‘In the interval between signifying and not signifying, there must be a hesitation, a blur, a minimal disproportion in the distribution of forces. That imperfection is the ‘human’ component of music, contributing to its ineffability and, consequently, to its beauty. Where nothing hesitates, nothing can truly sound.’ Or more simply put: ‘In the gap between what lives and what dies lies the ineffable dimension of music.’

As the author concludes: ‘For music to exist, it must live within a shared illusion inside a specific culture… What in one culture is a banal whistle in another is music. This variability renders music ineffably alive.‘

There was a musical incident I still remember from high school. In those pre-digital days, I was an avid collector of ‘classical music’ LPs (long-playing records) and I took one of my favourite records over to my friend Linda’s house who also shared my love of music. We both played the piano, although Linda was actually talented. I brought a collection of the Chopin etudes, but I chose to start with his Revolutionary etude (Opus 10, Number 12). After scratching my way over the grooves to find it, we both sat back in awe of the constant struggle between the octaves -the left hand seeming to try to dominate with the bass and constantly trying to drag the right hand away from where it felt more comfortable: in the treble keys.

I’m not sure who won the contest, but we both sat there, tears running down our faces, totally enmeshed in the music.

“You gotta pull for the left hand in this one, eh G?”

I shook my head. “Actually, I think the right hand out-sparkles the left… sorry.”

Linda  chuckled and her eyes twinkled as she shook her head. “Out-sparkles, maybe, but the bass is so commanding, it just dominates the keyboard.”

I frowned, theatrically. “You’re just allocating hyper-masculinity to the left hand, Lin!”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“The bass part is just a show of male power, don’t you think: dominance and all that…?”

“And the treble is just the high pitched girlie-giggle as she tries to escape the clutches of the over-muscled left hand…?”

“Chopin didn’t want the reputation of effeminacy… He had to throw in a few masculine challenges, eh?”

Her eyes positively sparkled at that. “You mean, to satisfy his girlfriend George Sand?”

I half nodded, having already been carried away with my insufferable imagination.

Linda’s eyes turned mischievous; after all, she was the closest person to a musicologist that I knew in those days. “He wrote the Revolutionary etude in around 1831 and didn’t meet Sand until 1836 -or maybe it was 1838, so…”

I smiled; Linda knew everything there was to know about music and I rolled my eyes to tell her so.

She sighed and shook her head. “You know that none of this musical knowledge will get us very far in school, don’t you? To everybody else it’s just trivia…” She hesitated for a moment and then smiled. “Did you bring that essay over for me to look at… I won’t copy it, I promise. I just need a few ideas about how to phrase things like you do.”

But our relationship was short lived: my parents moved a lot in those days (my father worked for the railway), and the next year I found myself in a new school in the Anglo area of a French community just outside of Montreal. The language used in the classrooms was a liberal mixture of English and Quebecois so at first I felt isolated at school there. I decided to take a music class as a non-lingual elective.

In the initial class, the teacher, with a sly look on his face, decided to find out how much we knew about classical composers and played the famous first three cords of the Rachmaninoff prelude in C# minor on the piano. Then he turned to the uninterested class and asked (en Anglais, fortunately) “Who wrote that?”

The class was silent and he rolled his eyes until I put up my hand. “Rachmaninoff, sir,” I said, embarrassed at breaking the silence. Every eye was on me; apparently the teacher was known for trying to embarrass each new class of the year.

A smile suddenly appeared on his face and then a wicked grin. “But can you spell his name…?”

I could, and did, and the whole class applauded. Who knew? As Oscar Wilde wrote: ‘Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.’

Thanks Linda…

[i] https://psyche.co/ideas/music-speaks-louder-than-words-through-what-it-leaves-unsaid

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