Music, Appreciated

Rorke thinks about organised sound

The Latch-Key to Music by J. D. M Rorke

Music means a very great deal to people. Without it, many might find their lives not worth living. If deprived of the only thing that consistently brings joy, offers solace, gives consolation colour and depth — what would some people be driven to? The only friend that is always there. The only support that never fails. We are very lucky to have it. What J. D. M. Rorke wishes to do in this very brief pamphlet — counterpoint to a far larger work which I have not read — is to get to the bottom, to a very limited extent, of what music is, and how one might begin to appreciate it.

Here are one or two little instances which I think Rorke brings out well. He says that, if a particular type of person was to be listen to a record or a performance or even reading a score, and that record were to be turned down — not switched off, just muted — the concert called off or the score taken from their hands, their own internal gramophone (this is an old book) would go on turning so that if and when the music was turned back on again, the concert restarted where it was, the score handed back to them at the correct page, they would have been following the song along perfectly, and would sync back up again with it in flawless fashion. Even if they were not thinking of the music at all. Even if they were completely and wholly distracted. The internal metronome in some people, and their wordless ability to recall tunes and melodies, might be prodigious. There are videos of drummers on YouTube, for instance, who play so perfectly and with such timing that it is almost mechanical, yet they infuse their playing with so much emotion — for want of a better word, soul — that there is nothing machine-like about them. It is almost supernatural.

One might say that for other people, it’s hard to describe them in more detail, they never recall a melody or a song the same way. Some people — there are many theories why and they all differ — come from ultimately oral cultures where the recitation of poetry is deep and engrained. Those people can carry around lyrics in their heads and recall them perfectly at a moment’s notice.

Other people can’t remember poetry, can’t recall lyrics. This isn’t, in many cases, simple lack of recall or memory. Instead, it’s to do with what memory is. If memory is merely a process of recreation, as we now believe it to be, it may be that for some who are perhaps a little more chaotic, a little more creative, every time they might recall a lyric, they are in fact re-writing it to their own satisfaction. All of this happens quite subconsciously.

There are schools of thought especially among online music teachers and course-sellers which say that there are only four chords one might need to know to learn modern Western music. Or that there are certain runs of notes which are almost guaranteed to produce tears in the eyes of a member of the audience. The four chord theories are likely wrong, not least because the proponents of it seem like charlatans. But the idea that certain notes have physiological analogues, which cannot ultimately be resisted, is one that goes deep into biology. Picture Charles Darwin at his piano, testing which notes in which octaves appear to excite the earthworm, thus learning a little about how some animals notice the vibration of air at certain frequencies as part of their basic biological functions — which is, after all, how our own ears work.

What Rorke communicates more than anything else in this little book is a great love and a great appreciation. Music appreciation ought not, he says, to be unnecessarily academic. (Rorke believes in music academia; he is an advocate of it and a champion. But for ordinary passers-by, he says, it is not the first port of call.)

Appreciation must be at least a little experiential, about deciding that something which has given uncountable pleasure and comfort to millions can’t be all bad, and can’t be completely inaccessible to ordinary intelligences applying themselves only sparely in their free time. So listen, he says. Listen. Listen to everything there is. And realise what it is you like. After all, it’s your choice. It’s your taste. It’s your life.