A Note From Watching Alive Show

I am a child of a former journalist and a music teacher, piano to be exact. I can tell I am lucky enough to be rather familiar with the world of art since my early childhood. My father, who passed a hint of his fondness for art and literature on me, would take me to exhibitions, museums, and galleries. As for my mother, on certain days she held her classes at home so I was provided with the sound of the crisp and sharp piano strings (and sometimes, with the frustrated sighs and scoldings) effortlessly. As time passed by, I grew more and more curious about art and I couldn’t be sure why, but I always had a special place for music in life.

When I was little, our house was filled with books. Me and my brother had a cabinet to store our books, comics, encyclopedias, and magazines, while my father used a lot more space across the house for himself. We always had books even in the toilet and the pile changed from time to time. I always had considered myself as a fond reader, because I grew while having a particular interest in readings, from children books to philosophy. But as I realize how shabby, shallow, and narrow my references range, I am not going to talk about my taste in literature. What I’d like to share is the realization of some periods which I happened to ‘stop’ reading. I think I was having the least supplemental reference in junior high school. I’m not sure but I guess I was preoccupied with other things I thought were more urgent and essential at the time. I started to really begin to feed myself with readings again when I reached high school. And just like literature, my development of references in music was not so remarkable too.

From basic classical references that I acquired from home and study, (and because my English ability and canals of foreign entertainment was considerably poor) I was exposed to local MTV, Indonesian Top 40’s, pop Melayu, and I was really into it. My only other source of influence was my brother’s MP3 player which happened to introduce me the taste of brit-pop, a bit of popular swing and jazz, bossanova, and some indie music. Then, in junior high school when I got the privilege of internet and good radio station, I began to really explore and cater myself with the scenes I liked. But again, it is not my preferences that I’d like to talk about. It is that I noticed how music had never really left and always managed to stun me.

Of course, there were times when I stopped searching for new sounds. Even when I adored Indonesian indie and oldies pop so greatly in my high school years, there was a certain period when I didn’t bother to broaden my knowledge and listen to the songs I had not known. Not to mention, my recognition of the current pop music was always a good while behind. But I felt that it was so easy to talk music to most people, as if changes and differences in our taste and opinions were gems to trade about. It was always a subtle topic, and although it wasn’t constantly be the center of conversation, music had never quit my attention. I made good friends through music and some notable few long lasted with excellent terms. It really did connect people. Aside from the universality of language, I had never encountered with any other entity that’s so great it blurred the unseen boundaries between humans and somehow joined them instead.

I haven’t been able to master any instrument. A lot of people had found this suspicious because my mother was a piano teacher, and as everyone suspected, I must have been infused with the skill in similar terrain accordingly. I was enrolled in classical piano courses since preschool and it went on and off until high school, yet even now I can’t recite the right musical notes in scales by their proper names (!). I could go on an endless list of where things might have went wrong, but somewhere along the way, I realize that I really missed the chance to develop a musical sense to the level that I’d be able to rehearse and create sounds in certain complexity. Now I’m talking one of the biggest regret in my life, that I have wasted such an amazing opportunity of time, and this might be the stem of my envy towards people who took theirs, wisely.

I can say I am friends with so many good people, supportive peers to my musical thirst. I have friends whose taste and references I subjectively consider wide-ranging and undoubtedly refined. I also have friends who are literal geniuses in playing and making music. These two kinds sometimes overlap, but I am heavily filled with a particular jealousy of people who are able to play and make music because: all the power they have! I don’t want to and I can’t talk much about the brilliance or the detailed sophistication in their creative process and technicality. But the fact that they are capable and in control of producing some ethereal matter to be so easily consumed and enjoyed by anyone who volunteers in to the experience has left me flabbergasted. I often wonder to myself, what makes music to be so important to us, so general, and so close?

Just last night, I went to a live music show and I took some moment to contemplate immediately. I learned that sound is transmitted through air by vibration. It is an after impact, a product of transformation from motion interpreted into audio, deliverance of a shift in an object that is transferred and receipted by another object through its surface; specifically, our hearing organs. And as the sound is transmitted omnidirectionally, our bodies are surrounded by air and surfaces of objects, of the ground, of the wall, of the furniture. That means when we receive this transmission and listen to a noise, to sound, to music, we are undergoing an interference in the form of wave which length touches all over our bodies. We are listening through our ears, but we are experiencing the sound with every single inch of our skin.

I have to admit that this explicit mechanism might be debatable due to my personal lack of scientific reliability and defective to fit the condition of earphone or headphone usage. But when the sound is sourced indirectly to our audial organs, music has established a spherical territory in which we inhabit. It becomes a context, it builds a specific atmosphere wrapping us in a certain range. As for watching live performances, we are also provided by vision and our visual organs are connecting the impulses with the presence of sound that makes the whole show is awakening and serving at least three out of our five senses. I find this is utterly different from other forms of art, such as paintings or sculptures. Some of them are indeed three-dimensional, but nothing fills in spaces like music does in an intangible and invisible way. And with live performances, the space is alive.

Imagine the distance between the music performers on the stage and us audiences, and the space continued through and beyond our bodies, all loaded by the stream of sound waves. The waves come from the authority in the hands of animate objects, the performers, who are free to weave and bend the music in the fabric of space and we, the audiences, are bombarded by the dynamic and fluid extension of sound. We are bound to it in a specific period of flowing time. The performers have taken hostages of us through their music, and we are captivated.

And the magnificence I found in live music show didn’t stop here. I also came to the revelation on the significance of lyrics. It’s appeared to me that when lyrics were added into the structure of harmony, literature had conjugated with music and words held the precious responsibility in conveying the message they bore in the songs. So when we are served with music and lyrics, not only we are taken hostages, but also we are fed with particular ideas in the meanwhile. Not only that our senses are exposed to impulses, but our minds are also provoked by these ideas. It is such an experience that allows us to savor beauty with our whole identity very instantly, as a coherent union of body and mind.

At some level of intensity and consciousness, the perceiving of music can be overwhelming. But essentially, the reception of musical impulses is a colossal physical phenomenon occurring to almost everyone. Maybe this is how music touches our lives, because its nature is embedded in the body of space and most of time, we can’t escape space. Therefore, we accept music, shape our very own palate for it, because it is how we cope and treat nature; we find and exploit beauty in it. Maybe this is how we surrender to the beauty of sounds, for we have no choice but to give ourselves away in the body of art, and let it touch us all over.