Here’s something you never see:
A person in the produce section at your local market turns to the person next to them and says “I like zucchini more than spinach,” to which another shopper within earshot responds angrily: “You’re wrong! Yellow squash is SO MUCH BETTER. You obviously don’t know anything about food.” The exchange escalates, and the two parties come to blows.
Right away, we find the above scenario absurdly far-fetched. That’s because we don’t typically see disagreements boil over when it comes to culinary preferences, and if they did we would laugh at them. Why, then, do we always see the equivalent phenomenon when it comes to music? Why is there so much violence in the disagreements we see on just about any YouTube clip — even though we all know that taste is subjective and varies from person to person?
short answer (for now): Because music tends to arouse such a powerful form of transcendence that it’s very difficult for the individual to imagine other people not responding the same way. Reflexively, we all feel an immediate disdain and hostility towards anyone who doesn’t share in that transcendence.
In other words, music triggers irrationally religiosic and tribalistic impulses in people — it’s also the perfect vehicle to help us understand those impulses.
To paraphrase the famed neurologist Oliver Sacks (from the preface to his book Musicophilia), rare is the person who hasn’t experienced the utter thrall that music induces. As Sacks pointed out, even people who don’t particularly care about music tend to have the same response when they come across a piece of music that grabs them.
For so many of us, then, our response to music is our truth. We cannot deny the eruption of neuro-chemical, emotional and physiological sensations that flood our being. Our response feels so concrete that we can’t step outside of it to conceive of any other response. We can catalog the fact that there might be responses that differ from ours, but we can’t feel them and our system reflexively arms itself with resistance and hostility towards responses that oppose our own. Which makes it very easy to fall into the trap of confusing our truth with the truth.
Walking around with blind, immovable conviction about anything is, of course, a dangerous place to be. And, while it may seem harmless to indulge that state when it comes to music, if we don’t put our foot down and make it a habit to remind ourselves that each person’s musical “truth” is a universe unto itself, then we endorse a kind of tunnel vision that very easily bleeds into other areas of perception where the consequences are far more grave.
Which is why I half-jokingly refer to music as the dangerous passion.
Until I became a parent, I would’ve told you without hesitation that music was the most important relationship in my life. (Not coincidentally, I would’ve also told you that it was the most difficult relationship too.) Clearly, music can occupy such a central role in a person’s life that it becomes one of the cornerstones of one’s identity. No surprise, music functions in much the same way on a collective scale too, effectively serving as the compass for a culture’s understanding of itself.
As wondrous and sublime as music is — as much as it stands as a towering reminder that nature can be senselessly beautiful in a way that defies explanation as much as its brutality does — music, in my view, must also be recognized as a dangerous passion to be approached with caution or, at the very least, with clarity.
More (and more and more) on this to come.