2nd draft--Meditation piece
Music has substance-it contains life. We are often surrounded by it, and don’t even notice it. The way the wind breathes through the trees, the sound of a lover’s voice. Even an argument has a melody. The harshness harkens to the sorrow contained in the darker deeper notes of the scale.
Music carries us through our days, from the high points to the low points. It is surprising what a song can do to someone, when they hear it for the first time. I know that my favorites have stuck with me from early childhood. There are also songs from recent years that move my soul more so than I ever thought possible. The poetry that is created and put to chords & notes can touch you deep and true. There is an honesty in “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” by Johnny Cash. Just as much can be said for any Classical work-such as, “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Chopin; we need not words to tell the story, to evoke feelings that are primal within human nature.
My whole life has been filled with music. My mother would sing in our small kitchen while she cooked. My brothers and sisters, repeatedly playing their records/8-tracks/tapes, and finally CDs, very loudly in their respective rooms and cars influenced me greatly, in my own personal taste and love of music. I myself worked at a record store for less than six months, but I still recall it as being one of my most favorite jobs of all time.
Hearing my mother sing Tom Jones, whilst obsessively playing Joan Baez & traditional bagpipe reels are the main sounds of my childhood. Like the lead character from the movie, “High Fidelity,” I can give you my top 5 songs of all time, of my childhood, as well as those that remind me of my past relationships. There seemed to have been cues, at various points in time, signaling either the end of a particular pattern, or the beginning of the next phase in my life experience. Being that I have always found myself making these musical connections, I have spent a good deal of time making mixed tapes and CDs, scouring my personal archives for just the right track to describe the feeling I was trying to present, or the person that I was giving the collection to. I wanted to show them a piece of myself, in the way I would arrange the songs, in the particular songs that I chose. It is never an easy task to sit down, and throw an anthology together. It takes hours, perhaps days, for such a project to come to fruition.
Sharon Alice Bailey, my mother, was a country woman at heart. Her Bakersfield accent would come through most often when playing old Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton LPs on our beat up record player. She spoke with a soft alto timbre that had once carried higher notes, before 40 years of smoking weathered it. Her petite frame masked an oft loud & boisterous personality. Her voice would ring out from the kitchen, especially on holidays, booming through the walls, in her passive aggressive effort to get us up and out of bed to hang out with her, and do chores.
My mother died almost four years ago. As with other trying times in my life, I sought solace in my CDs to make sense of her rapidly spreading cancer & death by essentially starvation, due to her choice of hospice care. The Dixies Chicks have a song on their album “Taking the Long Way” that is about the loss of a mother & an adult child’s reflection on the “Silent House” (the title of the track) that is left behind. It was instantly recognizable a sad song, no matter what my personal circumstances were at the time. I did not react with an immediate “This is my life” reaction, upon hearing it the first time. It took time for the words to sink in, as well as my mother’s health to slip away, before I significantly felt the meaning behind the song.
Sitting on the edge of my twin bed one day, I was getting ready to make the drive (it is 100 miles from my apartment to my mother’s house) with my boyfriend and my best friend in tow. I had “Silent House” on repeat while I gathered up my bag and my will to go. By the second go round, it was very clear to me that I was going to be saying goodbye, very soon, and I needed to face that. “And I will try to connect all the pieces you left,…how the laughter and light filled up this silent house.” Natalie Maine’s nasal twang filled my ears as the song played on. My tears fell in time with the fiddle’s solo.
I was relieved when the song was over; I did not want to feel so destroyed again. I did not play that particular track again, until the day of my mother’s wake, about a month later. Upon reflection and further listening, the track is about feeling the loss of a loved one, noting the silence that their absence creates, which can be so loud sometimes it is like they are still in the room screaming out for your attention. It is an intriguing dynamic, to me, that the silence created by my mother’s death still resounds with music.
The ability to make us, the listener, feel what the artist is trying to convey is wholly the point of Art. That art can be writing, making music, or painting. Even sewing an article of clothing creates a way to show the world something that it wouldn’t have seen before. Within music, we hear with the entirety of our being. Our souls can sing with both heartache and joy. For me, I find great joy & great sorrow within music. I enjoy both of these feelings, for even sadness has a beauty all its own. It enlightens my mind, unburdens my heart. It inspires me to compose my own bits of poetry, expanding upon ideas put forth by my favorite artists. It gives me hope that I, too, can tap my creativity, showing the world another facet of the Human Condition. This is the power that is harnessed within song.
Music carries us through our days, from the high points to the low points. It is surprising what a song can do to someone, when they hear it for the first time. I know that my favorites have stuck with me from early childhood. There are also songs from recent years that move my soul more so than I ever thought possible. The poetry that is created and put to chords & notes can touch you deep and true. There is an honesty in “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” by Johnny Cash. Just as much can be said for any Classical work-such as, “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Chopin; we need not words to tell the story, to evoke feelings that are primal within human nature.
My whole life has been filled with music. My mother would sing in our small kitchen while she cooked. My brothers and sisters, repeatedly playing their records/8-tracks/tapes, and finally CDs, very loudly in their respective rooms and cars influenced me greatly, in my own personal taste and love of music. I myself worked at a record store for less than six months, but I still recall it as being one of my most favorite jobs of all time.
Hearing my mother sing Tom Jones, whilst obsessively playing Joan Baez & traditional bagpipe reels are the main sounds of my childhood. Like the lead character from the movie, “High Fidelity,” I can give you my top 5 songs of all time, of my childhood, as well as those that remind me of my past relationships. There seemed to have been cues, at various points in time, signaling either the end of a particular pattern, or the beginning of the next phase in my life experience. Being that I have always found myself making these musical connections, I have spent a good deal of time making mixed tapes and CDs, scouring my personal archives for just the right track to describe the feeling I was trying to present, or the person that I was giving the collection to. I wanted to show them a piece of myself, in the way I would arrange the songs, in the particular songs that I chose. It is never an easy task to sit down, and throw an anthology together. It takes hours, perhaps days, for such a project to come to fruition.
Sharon Alice Bailey, my mother, was a country woman at heart. Her Bakersfield accent would come through most often when playing old Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton LPs on our beat up record player. She spoke with a soft alto timbre that had once carried higher notes, before 40 years of smoking weathered it. Her petite frame masked an oft loud & boisterous personality. Her voice would ring out from the kitchen, especially on holidays, booming through the walls, in her passive aggressive effort to get us up and out of bed to hang out with her, and do chores.
My mother died almost four years ago. As with other trying times in my life, I sought solace in my CDs to make sense of her rapidly spreading cancer & death by essentially starvation, due to her choice of hospice care. The Dixies Chicks have a song on their album “Taking the Long Way” that is about the loss of a mother & an adult child’s reflection on the “Silent House” (the title of the track) that is left behind. It was instantly recognizable a sad song, no matter what my personal circumstances were at the time. I did not react with an immediate “This is my life” reaction, upon hearing it the first time. It took time for the words to sink in, as well as my mother’s health to slip away, before I significantly felt the meaning behind the song.
Sitting on the edge of my twin bed one day, I was getting ready to make the drive (it is 100 miles from my apartment to my mother’s house) with my boyfriend and my best friend in tow. I had “Silent House” on repeat while I gathered up my bag and my will to go. By the second go round, it was very clear to me that I was going to be saying goodbye, very soon, and I needed to face that. “And I will try to connect all the pieces you left,…how the laughter and light filled up this silent house.” Natalie Maine’s nasal twang filled my ears as the song played on. My tears fell in time with the fiddle’s solo.
I was relieved when the song was over; I did not want to feel so destroyed again. I did not play that particular track again, until the day of my mother’s wake, about a month later. Upon reflection and further listening, the track is about feeling the loss of a loved one, noting the silence that their absence creates, which can be so loud sometimes it is like they are still in the room screaming out for your attention. It is an intriguing dynamic, to me, that the silence created by my mother’s death still resounds with music.
The ability to make us, the listener, feel what the artist is trying to convey is wholly the point of Art. That art can be writing, making music, or painting. Even sewing an article of clothing creates a way to show the world something that it wouldn’t have seen before. Within music, we hear with the entirety of our being. Our souls can sing with both heartache and joy. For me, I find great joy & great sorrow within music. I enjoy both of these feelings, for even sadness has a beauty all its own. It enlightens my mind, unburdens my heart. It inspires me to compose my own bits of poetry, expanding upon ideas put forth by my favorite artists. It gives me hope that I, too, can tap my creativity, showing the world another facet of the Human Condition. This is the power that is harnessed within song.