Music is a good thing. Music is a very good thing. My mother put me through the torture of piano lessons when I was a kid (which I'm hoping to pick back up again now). Things got jazzier as I got into band and started playing the trombone (which is the most laid-back and awesome of all the brass; no valves, no keys, just a slide). I started playing guitar in 7th grade and have been playing ever since. I played bass guitar in marching band, and to this day I keep an acoustic guitar ("Laurië" after the poem Namárië by J.R.R. Tolkien *pushes up glasses*.) next to my desk (Schreibtisch).I don't keep it there as a distraction from studies, but a source for my studies. When I look to my guitar I can hear warm tones in the wood. I know that there is a peaceful mystery that resides in that instrument, and playing guitar puts me in touch with it. When I write a paper, often times I look at it as an object to be dominated, but my musical experience teaches me something different. Art and music teach one creativity, taking notes and colors with various textures and strengths, and bringing them together in a new and inspiring order. The most important element that is brought together and synthesized in this union (Einigung) is the artist or musician himself.
When I play my guitar, I play with my guitar. Strings demand that I use my hands differently for different notes. My many fingers work together, plucking and fretting, coaxing tones out of the strings that resonates the wood and a harmony appears. Overtones work together to make a note that is bigger than a string or a piece of wood, and it's a beautiful thing. I stumble to put in to words, because as Gustav Mahler said, "If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music."
Music is an art, but it deals with harmony and time in a way that art doesn't as much. There are times in my life when I feel dissonance between me and another, but I am more atune to it because I have played music, and I have sensed what real dissonance feels like. Deviation from harmony and deviation from rhythm do not create that sense of peace and awe that strikes a chord in the human soul. It is asinine in it's inability to ring with the rest of us.
There is a harmony to life where you find your place in the great Chord of Creation, you might have a high or a low note, but without you, we would be missing a voice.
There is a rhythm to life, where we come and go, either quickly or slowly, and find our place in time, ready to use our voice and leave until the score calls for us again.
"A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence." Leopold Stokowski
Listen to music that makes you and something outside of you ring together (Zusammenklang). Today music is used to fill the background because we are uncomfortable with silence. When people listen to great music that makes sense to them and sense of them, they might say it was like a religious experience. I believe these people are usually more right than they know, because this music put them in touch with Beauty, and for a moment or two, they rang together. When one lets themselves become part of the music, they are laying aside their petty anxieties, they are sacrificing their voice for the good of the whole. Because God is Beautiful, they did for a moment see him, sing with him, and practice that communion of spirit and that union of diversity that the (spiritual life) requires.
If you need to work on your Harmony
Tübingen Wörter
Nomina
I. die Leidenschaft: passion
II. der Schutt: rubble
Verben
I. ausschreien (schrie aus, ausgeschrie'n): to cry out
II. etw. erhalthen (erhielt, erhalten): to achieve something
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