12. Music

Why did you flee secretly and deceive me and not tell me? I would have sent you away with mirth and songs, with tambourine and lyre. –Genesis 31:27

When I was a little boy, I recall walking in on my father in the midst of conducting his own private orchestra. He was wearing a pair of headphones the size of cabbages and waiving around a pretzel rod as if it were a baton. I wondered, as I watched, how someone could get so lost in a piece of music, a thing you could not see or touch.

It was only after watching my father over the course of several such performances that it occurred to me that he was, in fact, seeing and feeling the music, though I had yet to figure out how he was perceiving these sounds as sights and tactile sensations. As he listened, all else disappeared and time evaporated. I wondered if he'd attended a special school to learn how to conduct so well or how to experience music in this way.

For me, music was something to be listened to and an "ear only" experience. For my father, music was something to be watched and it transported him to other places. As I listened through the years, I learned to start with the titles of the given pieces to give me a hint of what the composer had in mind. These titles often provided an initial image, but sometimes were more confusing than no title at all. It was about the time my parents took me to see Fantasia by Walt Disney that the scales fell from my eyes and a whole world I never knew existed was opened to me.

Fantasia was just the object lesson I needed to jumpstart my sense of the visual aspect of music. In this world, talking about the color of music made perfect sense, and music became a method of prayer or a way of seeing some deeper part of myself that was inaccessible during the day when other sounds, less pleasing to my ear interfered with such inner vision.

After silence, that which comes the closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
–Aldous Huxley

Where in your "noisy" life have you made an intentional space to "hear the music"?