(Photo: Atef Safadi)
“Without music I
should wish to die. Even poetry, Sweet Patron Muse forgive me the words, is not
what music is.”
-
Edna St Vincent Millay
In which I pay tribute to bands/artists/albums that have had
a significant impact in my life.
Meaning is ubiquitous (at least in the human world), and the
meaning we ascribe to music is strongly connected to the events, thoughts and
emotions at the time of listening, remembering, and re-listening. Often I’ll
hear a tune I’ve not heard in some time, and remember with acute detail what it
was I was doing or feeling in a past moment/a collection of moments. Sometimes
the recall will favour singular events or milestones, while at other times it
will just be an impression, a brushstroke. Sure enough, neuroscientists have
studied the connection between the brain and music, with evidence suggesting a
link between and the release of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine (generally),
and in the anticipation of key musical moments. Almost a century prior, Proust
waxed eloquence about the power of memory and music in his seven-volume opus, ‘In
Search of Lost Time’, which I shall leave here in its entirety for your reading
pleasure -
“The year before, at a soirée, he had heard a piece of music performed on
the piano and violin. At first, he had experienced only the physical quality of
the sounds secreted by the instruments. And it had been a keen pleasure when,
below the little line of violin, slender, unyielding, compact and commanding,
he had seen the mass of the piano part all at once struggling to rise in a
liquid swell, multiform, undivided, smooth and colliding like the purple tumult
of the waves when the moonlight charms them and lowers their pitch by half a
tone. But at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish an outline
clearly, or give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly charmed, he had
tried to gather up and hold on to the phrase or harmony - he himself did not
know which - that was passing by him and that had opened his soul so much
wider, the way smells of certain roses circulating in the damp evening air have
the property of dilating our nostrils. Maybe it was because of his ignorance of
music that he had been capable of receiving so confused an impression that is,
however, perhaps the only one which is purely musical, immaterial, entirely
original, irreducible to any other order of impression. An impression of this
kind, is for an instant, so to speak, sine materia. No doubt the notes we hear
then tend already, depending on their loudness and their quantity, to spread
out before our eyes over surfaces of varying dimensions, to trace arabesques,
to give us sensations of breadth, tenuousness, stability, whimsy. But the notes
vanish before these sensations are sufficiently formed in us not to be
submerged by those already excited by the succeeding or even simultaneous
notes. And this impression would continue to envelop with its liquidity and its
"mellowness" the motifs that at times emerge from it, barely
discernible, immediately to dive under and disappear, known only by the
particular pleasure they give, impossible to describe, recall, name, ineffable
- if memory, like a labourer working to put down lasting foundations in the
midst of waves, by fabricating for us facsimiles of these fleeting phrases, did
not allow us to compare them to those that follow them and to differentiate
them. And so, scarcely had the delicious sensation which Swann had felt die away
than his memory at once furnished him with a transcription that was summary and
temporary but at which he could glance while the piece continued, so that,
already, when the same impression suddenly returned, it was no longer
impossible to grasp. He could picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical
groupings, its notation, its expressive value; he had before him this thing
which is no longer pure music, which is drawing, architecture, thought, and
which allows us to recall the music. This time he had clearly distinguished one
phrase rising for a few moments above the waves of sound. It had immediately
proposed to him particular sensual pleasures which he had never imagined before
hearing it, which he felt he could be introduced to him by nothing else, and he
had experienced for it something like an unfamiliar love.”
Really, this exercise is just an excuse to bottle these feelings
in relation to the music of my formative years, because for some reason I’m
always afraid of them losing their relevance.
+++
The first in this feature is ‘The Crane Wife’, the 5th full length album
by Indie-Folk band The Decemberists. The
album is bookended by two story cycles – the titular ‘Crane Wife’ based on a
Japanese folk tale and Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’.
Opening with ‘The Crane Wife 3’, the narrator’s lament sets
up the album’s themes of loss, exploitation and regret. For the uninitiated,
the Decemberists’ version of the ‘Crane Wife’ folk tale sees a poor man
struggling through a cold winter, who happens upon a bloodied crane on his
doorstep. The man takes the crane in and tends to its wounds, and the crane flies
away upon being healed. Later, a woman appears at the man’s doorstep and the
two fall in love and marry. Still desperately poor, the wife offers to weave
silk cloths to make a living, on the condition that the man never watches her
weave in her loom room. As they gain more money, greed takes hold and the man
demands that the wife weaves more and more only to realise – too late – that
his wife/the crane had been using feathers from her own skin as thread. When
the Crane Wife sees the man spying on her, and thus breaking his promise, she
flies away, leaving the man desolate, broken and remorseful.
The ninth track of the album, ‘The Crane Wife 1 & 2’ returns
to the tale, and as the song title suggests, re-tells the story from the
beginning. The effect of which provides a certain circularity to the album, moving
seamlessly from open lament (“And I will
hang my head / hang my head / hang my head low”), hope (“All the stars were crashing ‘round / as I
laid eyes on what I found”) and retrospective guilt (“All I ever meant / to do / was to keep you”). The intervening songs
do not quite match the heights of the ‘Crane Wife’ narrative, musically or
otherwise, including the ambitious 12 minute prog-rock influenced track, ‘The
Island: Come and See / The Landlord’s Daughter / You’ll Not Feel the Drowning’,
telling the chilling tale of rape and murder in a way arguably only Colin Meloy
could ("I spied in sable / The landlord's daughter / Produced my
pistol, then my saber / To make no whistle, or thou will be murdered!").
Traditionally, I’ve glossed over the other tracks, and although
the backdrop of war in songs such as ‘Yankee Bayonet’ and ‘When the War Came’
do provide a cohesive whole to the themes of loss and love, they’ve always fell
flat for me. An exception is album closer, ‘Sons & Daughters’ with the swell
of “Hear all the bombs fade away” recalling the cathartic kind of hope perhaps
only possible following the kinds of horrors and atrocities explored on the
album.
