Can't Stop the Music

“You know what music is? God's little reminder that there's something else besides us in this universe; harmonic connection between all living beings, every where, even the stars.” I’m not sure what the screenwriter of August Rush was thinking when we wrote this, but when you look past the sentimentalized, poetic traits of that statement, it’s a load of nonsense. Music isn’t some God-sent reminder, and pieces of music can hardly be considered prophetic or universal. Music exists only as ideas in our minds, until that idea is expressed by transforming sound into art.

Music takes shape in a limitless array of styles, and genres are trivial, since the boundaries they set are so easily breached. But even though music isn’t nearly as fantasized as it is in August Rush, it still has some unaccountable aspect to it that brings people together.

This summer at camp, I brought my saxophone along, hoping to not return home sucking. There were quite a few musicians there, among them, a guitarist and bassist from my bunk. One day, they just came up to me and asked if I wanted to jam. I’d barely hung out with them, and on no account was friends with them, but music was something we shared. And somehow, we spent the next two hours playing the same standard twelve-bar blues. It never got boring, and we didn’t tire of it because we improvised, and thrived off of each others innovations. While we played, there was some indescribable quality to what we were doing that made any other aspect of our personality unimportant. All that mattered was that we all loved music. They could have been a thousand times better than me, but I doubt they would have cared. They probably didn’t appreciate jazz in the same manner that I did, but they enjoyed it, and asked to play again numerous times over the course of the summer.

The same unearthly power is displayed every time you go to a concert. There could be hundreds of people there with you, and you could have very little in common with all of them, but there will inevitably be one thing you share: a love of music. Music is all around us. Its use is everywhere and limited to very little. Music is the quiet jazz sax you hear in an elevator. It’s the band with terrible sound quality that goes on when you’re on the phone and get put on hold. It’s the way-too-loud loud beat that gets played all night in clubs. It’s the eerie screeching violin at the climax of a thriller, the screaming lyrics of heavy metal, the classic opera that’s still playing five hundred years after it was written. Even though it has taken on countless forms and styles, music has thrived as far back as the history books go. And although the title of this post may just be a cheesy musical comedy from the 80’s, the mantra stands true: you can’t stop the music.

- B. Roos