If you have ever written a poem or drawn a painting, you’ve probably experienced how sound can instantly teleport you into that mental space creative minds call the zone. When in this space, the world around stops and creative juice flows through you like magic dust falling through a sieve into a cup. If you have ever made up anything inspired — a building design, a business plan, a recipe — you have been to the zone.
Do you sometimes wonder how music does it? How the sound of a song you’ve never heard before — just the sound of it — can dramatically change your mood in a way that has nothing to do with the lyrics? One second your ears are striking a chord with the beat, the next, your mind is inundated with pictures and a sense that you can create anything. Vistas open to another dimension where stuff flows out of you as if you were a tap channeling water from a pipe. It’s amazing what you can create in the zone.
There is a certain attunement to sound that comes with being a creative mind. When you hear the music you don’t just sway in the waves of its rhythm, you hear something distinctive in the way the instruments play with each other. You pick up how one instrument notes different strokes in the left and right speakers, each note intricately laying over another; and if your ears are keen enough, you can even hear the player’s thumb strum the keys or pick at a string, or their fingers pressing the buttons on the sax. It’s intoxicating.
I have a theory that everyone is born a poet. You either grow up to express it in words, images, or tunes; or you grow up to forget it. Whichever way you wind up, music will always be that thing that takes you back to the place where the poet in you begins. I think that people who give up their creative side become music fanatics because they can stimulate the creative process. When your imagination falls into play with the instruments or travels with the lyrics aboard the sound, a sedate version of the zone takes place. Even the wildest clubber will tell you they have a song which simmers them down when stress steams their kettles to a whistle. Music is therapeutic.
Most creation accounts recorded in ancient sacred texts will tell you that sound was the first creation. I’m particularly enamoured with the Krishnamurti version. According to its interpretation of Vedic text, Vishnu opens his mouth to speak when he wishes to create the world, making an ‘o’ sound which then produces light, out of which comes matter. I forget how Brahma comes into the picture but he appears upon a lotus flower floating in the expanse of space, with all forms of matter spewing out of his navel to arrange themselves into the things our five senses recognize as objects.
It’s a fascinating story because several thousand years after that Vedic account was first spoken (some 4000 years before Einstein’s era), the celebrity genius (Einstein) came up with a theory that the universe as we know it is made up of light. Since science still holds that sound travels through matter, is it not rational to conclude that sound comes from a place outside of, or beyond, the universe? Stay with me, this is going somewhere.
Picture, in your imagination, Vishnu seated on his godly carpet somewhere beyond the universe, uttering his ‘o’. Do you see it moving like a beam and hitting some primordial sun (Brahma) then splintering into infinite forms (matter spewing out of Brahma’s navel)?
Incidentally, the Judaic texts (Torah, bible, qu’ran) present the first creative act as god uttering a word. The bible, in particular, makes god the first literary guru when he utters the words “let there be”, and creation becomes, though he hasn’t yet won a literary award for originality.
Coincidentally, science, religion’s foremost critic and nemesis, tells us that the originating act of creation was the “big bang”. Apparently, gas accumulated in an unknown primordial sun, causing the atoms within to collide and bang, a big explosion occurred. Said, “big bang” brought forth random reactions out of which planets randomly formed and life randomly appeared on our blue one, eventually producing fish that evolved into monkeys, which in turn randomly evolved into you reading this piece while tourists take pictures of your cousins in Bwindi.
Do you see the thread stringing these disparate, disagreeing origin accounts together— Vishnu’s “o”, Yahweh’s “let there be”, science’s “bang”?
Every account begins with a sound.
When you read a poem or a novel or study a painting, a sculpture, or a picture, your imagination will do its flips, but those flips will be purely intellectual. You require some sort of erudition to enjoy the experience because of its cerebral. You are consuming with your mind.
Music is different. You could be the daftest human that ever lived or the snobbiest, but when that Michael Jackson beats starts, some part of your body will move.
No art form moves the human being like music. That is why David Cameron will insert a sorrowful tune in the scene when Jack freezes to death in the sea while his lover floats on a piece of wood. He knows you know jack was made up. He knows you don’t really care about jack or his spoilt lover. But when the tune plays you will feel sad even though you aren’t. Watch the same scene without sound and you might as well be watching a rat cross your path when you’re too tired to throw something at it.
Nothing manipulates human feelings like music. I suspect that is why all religious ceremonies start with music. It’s a quiet formidable force.
Some years back when I started my first proper attempt at the novel, something happened that marvels me to this day. Writing poetry is like picking fruit: you see a tree with nice fruit, help yourself to some, then go on about your life. No-fuss. Writing a novel, on the other hand, is like mining, especially when you’re new to it. Every word is a trip to earth’s core and back, you need something to keep your marbles in place when you are done with the day’s writing. Mine was music.
I would write in the mornings and nap after lunch, then write again after the nap, and listen to music in the evenings. I happened to be visiting family at the time and my two-year-old nephew had figured out my pattern so he always flew into the room when the music started playing.
One day, when the music player was blasting Bob Marley, my nephew came flying in as usual. If you are a wailers fan, you know how wicked their bass guitar and drums can get. You either move or they will move you (get yourself a copy of the 1976 album rastaman vibration, you will understand).
So there I am lying on the bed when my peripheral vision catches a glimpse of this tiny creature whizzing passed the door and flying into the room. At that exact moment, the track’s intro has reached its peak, and the drummer does this roll to cue in the band. When it ends, all the instruments fall in and the beat goes into flight mode. My nephew suddenly brakes mid-air. One leg is still in forward motion, the other is planted to the floor. A happy smile forms on his face. And in that impish fashion only kids can muster, he begins to dance the ‘chop-chop’— the classic reggae stroke in which you hop from one foot to the other like a Muganda brewing mwenge-bigere — exactly the way Bob does it in live recordings of him in concert. I don’t know where it came from, the kid had certainly never seen a video of bob in concert. While his dad is a bob fan, adulting had supplanted his love for bob. I was the first to play reggae in their house in the two years since the kid was born.
Before this incident, I used to think that people danced to reggae the same way because someone in Jamaica danced that way one day then it spread like a virus. It occurred to me that perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps the music dictated the movements and the dancers unconsciously followed suit. Perhaps every genre of music has its style and that is why you find people from different ends of the globe reacting to it the same way. Maybe that is why your head bobs when you hear larakaka, or why you feel like stamping the ground when kizino drums start. Perhaps that is why desert music makes you sit and shut your eyes when dancehall makes you jump and shout. The music is driving you.
At that moment I understood why people used to faint when Micheal Jackson took the stage at concerts. Music is the one art form that melts your cerebral power without effort. It’s the effect of the sound. Sound is subliminal.
Our ancestors believed that music was a doorway to heaven. When you played an instrument or sang with your voice (which is technically an instrument by the by), the sound reached into the cosmos and opened a door into the heavens. The spirits, or angels if you like, would then come down and their presence would make people dance. That was probably their way of saying that inspiration (or exceptional creative ability) comes from a place outside of the self, but it was not a concept unique to them. In Spanish tradition, where the English language borrows the term genius from, that moment of sudden inspiration is called genii (a legacy from centuries of being ruled the Muslim moors). When a dancer would shift into a sublime sequence, the audience would clap and shout ‘genii’, acknowledging that some ‘divine’ influence was moving through the dancer.
Many artists will tell you that music plays a prominent role in their creative process. Could it be because music takes them to that place beyond the light, where all things start, where creation begins?