The More Powerful Experience: Recreating Songs Yourself
Relating to Music:
We all have had the experience of relating to a song. Sometimes it’s the melody that really gets us or sometimes it’s the lyrics or even better when it’s both together! Then that song really penetrates our psych and sticks with us sometimes for the rest of our lives. A song can be a powerful thing simply in the fact that we will never forget them. They will stay with us forever. There have been numerous medical stories written on how people in comas or other medical conditions may not respond to speech but will respond to a song they know!
(Suggested reading: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks).
A Memory:
I will never forget this elderly man who heard my sister sing once. My sisters, friends and I used to sing at senior living facilities. We loved playing music and the seniors loved the entertainment. This one gentleman, who probably lived most of his current life in his wheelchair, could not speak. He was wheeled in curled up in his wheelchair, the survivor of a life-altering stroke. He was quiet for most of our Christmas music until my sister came up to sing an opera aria. She had been taking private lessons in opera at that time and we like showing off her talent. I can’t remember exactly which famous opera aria she sang but it was very different from the rest of the Christmas fun music that we had performed up until that point.
As she sang, this man began to make loud noises from his throat as he wriggled in his chair. Everyone noticed and watched. My sister noticed as she sang and she sang the rest of her aria at him as tears were running down his face! She started crying too! Everyone in the room watched them. When my sister was done, she went to him and held his hand and he just looked at her with tears coming down his face. Afterward his caretaker told us that this gentleman had had a career in music, but she didn’t know anything else about him beyond that fact. Whether he recognized that famous aria or he had some personal attachment to it or opera in general, we’ll never know, but we did know that he was moved by it.
Melodies, lyrics, songs:
They embed themselves within you because, here’s the thing, the writer is sharing a human experience through music that another human relates to. It is a communal human experience. At the same time, it is a communal experience that starts with a personal experience. Someone experienced life or observed life and communicated that in song form and someone else in the human experience was able to relate to it so deeply that it attached itself to the listener and stayed for life. That’s a lot of power and influence if you think about it.
Connecting with a song like that can bring inspiration for the future or can console someone who is in a similar place in life or it can have the happy positive energy people are feeling in their life or at a club or party. The reasons behind why a song attaches itself to a person are reasons why that same person brings it out again and again to listen to. It’s also why people share songs with each other.
What is the point?
When someone is able to digest a song even more deeply through being able to create it from their own body through an instrument, they are even >more capable of experiencing this communion of the human experience.
How Music Has Impacted My Life:
In my own life, hearing someone else put into music and words something that I have lived through or am living through, helps me process life events that I don’t have my own words for. It also anchors me. It reminds me that I am not in as much of isolation as I might feel,and I am not the only one feeling or experiencing these things. Some experiences are so deep in life that they are hard to mentally and emotionally reach into and process. Some of us don’t have our own language to communicate it to even ourselves. One of the superpowers of learning to play music is to be able to take the musical expression of human experiences and communicate those through music. This allows others to not only find hope and meaning but also make their message our own.
The Deeper Level:
Because it is our own too, we just didn’t have the words to say it or express it the way they did, but their way makes sense to us, it’s just as real to us, it’s a part of us that they already wrote about and that is healing. This is part of being in community with each other as human beings. Being able to communicate the human experience by creating music with one’s physical body is an invaluable experience. A gift to yourself. A tool of passion, self-awareness, and honesty. So take it to a deeper level: don’t just listen to a song, recreate it from inside you. It is a more powerful experience.
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