Music as Crystallised Emotion

The inexplicable wonders of air pressure differentials

All manner of art has the capacity to capture you in some way. When looking at Michelangelo’s David you might be captured by the sheer delicacy with which it’s been molded; the way the shapes and proportions of the human body have been idealised and brought to perfection. When admiring a painting you can likewise be captured. Maybe it’s a classic like the Mona Lisa or something more abstract, like The Starry Night. The best visual forms of art have the ability to pull you into the worlds of the artists and allow you to share their visions - to see the world through their unique perspectives and endow you with a point of view you couldn’t have conceived of on your own. And it’s all there, all at once. It’s possible to see the entire vision of the artist in a single glance, and since vision is our most essential and vivid sense, it’s also the sense most easily exploited by great artists and social media alike. But though with writing it takes more than a single glance to see the whole, among its many strengths, it too has this ability to present you with a vision. It’s reasonable enough to say that writing is the most versatile form of art. Unlike the visual medium, it can hijack the reader’s own capacity for visualisation. A picture can be painted just as well in words as it can in acrylic, and such a painting can be endlessly combined with a myriad of other faculties; the auditory, the cognitive, the emotional - creating a complex alchemy of novel inner perception. The reader can then be inserted into a whole new world which may at times seem more real than reality itself. 

Yet, despite all this, it’s always seemed to me, at least, that there’s one art form which is unique in a somewhat different way. An art form which, though it may not be as concise as the visual nor as informative as the literary, remains unique in the raw potency of its evocativeness. I’m talking about music.

There’s something different about music. While the visual combines detail and conciseness and the literary combines versatility and comprehensiveness, music is unique in that it seems to have the uncanny ability to bring the entirely personal, inexpressible detail of emotional evolution into a concretised form. Like a novella, a composition is a kind of story too. But it’s a story without a plot, so to speak. Or rather, the plot takes place entirely on the non-conceptual level of your experience. Like any good story it has a beginning, a middle, an end and all the subtle gradations, peaks and troughs you might expect, which together define a unique work. But while a literary story touches your heart by way of the conceptual realm, music does not. Instead it’s as though it pulls out the essence of a series of emotions, and inexplicably transcribes them into a waveform - into something actually concrete which can be consulted and re-experienced at will, pulled from the depths of the composer’s heart and externalised - made public for all to see. Mysteriously, if transcribed well, most of us seem to instantly recognise the intended meaning. There’s no need to think. No need to pay attention to any plot or familiarise oneself with the quirks of any character. Music speaks in a language which doesn’t need to be learned, a language whose meaning is understood just as readily as our own inner emotions are felt.

You might say: “Other art forms can be like that too. In paintings too I might find myself inexplicably caught in the grips of a certain emotion.” But the difference in potency is usually a wide chasm. After all, when you want to get into a cheerful mood, which is more well-suited to the job: a painting or a song?

There are many poetic ways we can try to get to grips with what it is about music which makes it have this effect. One aspect worth emphasising is that, unlike other art forms, music is entirely non-contextual. Sure, most genres might by association transport us to certain places and contexts. Strauss’ Radetzky march might bring to mind the annual New Year’s concert. Country music might call to mind a road trip you were once on as a kid. But the music itself has no context. Unlike a book, none of its content is restricted to one place and time; to one story, one character, the romance of one couple or tragedy of one Greek hero. Though all art expresses the universal, music has the unique capacity to instantly connect to the deepest, non-verbal layers of our souls without any intermediary, and pull us up (or down) into a certain state of being which a thousand words could only ever point to. As Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote in his The World as Will and Idea:

“(Music) does not express this or that particular and definite joy, this or that sorrow, or pain, or horror, or delight, or merriment, or peace of mind; but joy, sorrow, pain, horror, delight, merriment, peace of mind themselves.”

“Music expresses always only the quintessence of life.” It doesn’t tether itself to the contingencies and circumstances of any place or time, nor does it require us to step into the shoes of any single person or character. Like a great painting, it gives us instantaneously a certain point of view, yet like any great tale, it at the same time tells us a story; conveys a gradual and incremental evolution that might easily be compared to the progression of our own lives, miraculously condensed into a sequence of vibrations lasting for a minuscule fraction of a life’s duration.

As you know if you read the title, the point I really wanted to make is that, oftentimes, it seems to me that music can be best thought of simply as crystallised emotion. Like the chapters of a story or the ephemeral states of our inner experience, each chord in a composition melds naturally into another. When well-composed, music thus has a way of leading us easefully from one place to the next, by way of association. Like anger slowly melting into sadness at the realisation of a loss. Or that sadness in turn giving way to a renewed drive and motivation to take another step forwards. When not so well-composed, it can feel jarring and inappropriate, like the unlikely prospect of intense anger suddenly morphing into joy without any natural occasion for it. Each little twist and turn - each well-placed grace note or intermediate chord - can correspond to those subtly inexpressible variations we experience in our internal states as they slowly morph and transition. If the literary story is a journey through the environments painted by the author on the canvas of our minds, the musical journey is a journey through our own emotional landscape, “painted on” by the ingenious composer. Sometimes it might even call forth feelings and mind states we didn’t know we could experience. You’ll think “Oh wow, that was an amazing song.” But actually, it’s “Oh wow, I’ve never experienced anything quite like that before.” And why did you experience it? Because it was right there, in the sounds you just heard. In fact, those sounds were what you felt, except crystallised, made graspable. Those ‘sounds’ were the story you read in a book the other day, except fed through a filter, removing all the traces of explicit ideas, people and plot lines, leaving nothing but the raw impact. 

I don’t mean to demean the explicit, of course. All art has its value, and writing is incredible (otherwise I wouldn’t be writing anything). But I have to agree with Schopenhauer that music is different in a way. It’s a way of expressing meaning that can’t be replicated. You can combine it with writing of course. You can write lyrics, create a movie, or a game. But in its innermost nature, without the distraction of any overarching purpose or intended context, music has no context. And that’s precisely the point. Music tells the perennial stories of mankind in their non-verbal form - a radio transmission of profundity sent direct from the depths of the collective unconscious to our humble minds, entirely for free. 

Music is crystallised emotion.