Spells

People hear music in all kinds of different ways. Some people experience music as colours; others just see grey water pouring out of the speakers. Some never listen to lyrics, they just fall under a spell. Some eat it whole. Some just take a bite. Some of us like to get on our backs and roll around in it like a dog.

Tom Waits, 2009

In prehistoric times music ... was a branch of magic, one of the old and legitimate instruments of wonder-working.

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Lately I've been spending more and more of my day 'doing' music. Singing it, playing it, writing it. Making music feels like something real; like work. Your voice gets tired, your fingers get blistered, you end up with pages covered in scribbles. With luck, you're exhilarated.

By contrast, listening to music, especially on your own, can be an almost ghostly experience. We're so used to processing the world visually that it's hard to fully accept this stuff, these sound waves emerging from a speaker, really really exists. It's there, and it's everything and everywhere; then it's nowhere.*

Music is the closest thing we know to magic. Not a new thought, but one worth repeating.

*This sense of music as hallucination is compounded if I'm listening to it with my cat, who blithely ignores it. You might think that a loud, pitched noise apparently coming from nowhere would make an animal uneasy, but he's long accepted it as one of the oddities of living with humans. From his non-reaction I occasionally think I really might be the only one hearing it.