Tempo rubato…

As the season of maniacal merriment mechanically approaches… breathe.

I am torn between contemplation and mere acceptance. Alas, it’s my nature to question and cogitate while the rest of the world seems to just get on with stuff.

Outside the window, there was no music…   As winter bites, sometimes it feels (and feeling is a real thing, it can hurt) as though the vast quiet darkness is louder than no music… Yes, sparkles sparkle and prisoners of hope mean well, but sometimes it can seem that, as one famous droid said, “we’re doomed”.  Perhaps what is required is less robotic and more creatural – less digital and more analogue. The language, pictures, and stories we create can become more real than the brain’s digitally sparking axons and synapses.  A significant difference in our automatic behaviour and a more human or humane way is our breath.

To paraphrase Aldous Huxley; Above the silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is our breath.
“From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence. After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” AH

I recently had a chance to experience recording the solo vocal on a new song. Exciting, fun and enlightening (Thanks RM). I greatly enjoyed the opportunity but after a few sessions my inexperience showed through. Like an unpractised painter might paint an unconvincing painting or an amateur actor might have limited depth of character etc. Though the production of this ‘recording’ is arguably a good thing, the experience of creating it was by far a greater more impacting thing. I’ve sung with a big world-music choir for many years, I was part of a small harmony group for a few years. In the past, I sang in folk singalongs in the pub, and if course as a child and teenager I absorbed the spirited congregational singing of Cornish Methodism. Singing is essentially breathing sounds but why we sing and what we think/feel when we sing is a far bigger thing. As Oliver Sacks said, “Music is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional…”   To paraphrase Nietzsche; Life without music would be a mistake…

As I said, the season of merriment approaches…

As I looked through the window, all was sharply still, not a sign of movement in the trees, the sky is grey and still. Somehow, sometimes, time slows.  I am reminded of the Buddhist practice and the idea of the space between our breathing. Tempo rubato, stolen time, is what it says on some musical notation. Less robotic and more creatural breathing. Take a moment to know you are alive, to know your breathing… before the maniacal merriment mechanically takes over… jingle jingle… Tempo rubato… breeathe…

Out beyond ideas … there is a field. I’ll meet you there.