We buy manuals that tell us to model ourselves on Marcel Proust or Lao Tzu search out pathways to revitalise our sense of balance through Henry David Thoreau’s woods gaze at paintings to appreciate perspective. In our search for guides to live by, we seek directness and materiality – inspirational affirmations that flash across our smartphones: clever podcasts from clever people. Are you someone who embraces silence? If you were the composer of your life, how would you score it? Perhaps you welcome dissonance as a stranger you’re ready to greet. What if the pages of life’s lessons are found through the composer’s pen? If we listen to music’s silences and pauses, dissonances, consonances, key changes and rhythms, what might we learn? If your life were a musical score, how would it unfold? Would it be a chart-topping chorus and refrain, or a slow chromatic Wagnerian overture? Perhaps you improvise your days. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn,’ he wasn’t only talking about bringing the vividness of life to your jazz, but of rendering music as your life. When the saxophonist Charlie Parker said: ‘Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. Music’s ineffability transports us away from the mundane, allays sadness, evokes laughter, brings us to tears and rallies us to stand in unison. We rely on it as pleasure dome and panacea: ‘Music is the shorthand of emotion,’ Leo Tolstoy subtitles his play The Living Corpse (1911). We’re used to the companionship of music. We might not ordinarily say to ourselves, let’s modulate, or let’s change key, but every day we unconsciously conduct our lives as a musical composition, a symphonic masterpiece, an anthem, or a slice of hip-hop. ![]() If this gamut of expressions seems familiar, you’re right. We seem to be living in a maze of minor keys and open-ended cadences. Contrary motions of jangling melodies confront us. The present pandemic has brought us closer to ourselves.
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