I’ve always felt that the living essence of a sentient individual is the most precious thing in the universe. How could it not be, it's the point where all informations join and a whole world is put together into an experience of life. All the beautiful things that move us, our live-giving sense for aesthetics leaving us in awe and wonder for the world is what makes this whole experience worth while. Our awareness of the harmonic structure behind everything strikes a chord that lights us up and makes us fall in love with existence. This wisdom is nowhere more accessible and obvious than in music, so let's contemplate its nature to enrich our understanding and experience of this most glorious of all phenomena.

(Image: Everything is music - Michael Fehr)

Music as a Medium

A Medium is, amongst other things, a source of information. An information source is not thousands of informations all jumbled together, the whole is always more than its parts, a car is more than all the car parts piled on the ground. Consequently the medium of music isn’t a song or a sound, music is the source from which all the musical results of our encounter with it emerge from and as we all know from listening to music, there’s an inherent harmonic order to it, how the different frequencies relate to each other isn’t random it’s following a higher order.

But a Medium isn’t just a source of information it’s also an environment within which something may function or flourish. Water or air is a medium, the space within which we live is a medium, in the same way is the medium of music a space we can enter and grow in. Through our ability to create sounds and feel their relations to each other we can completely immerse our sentience into a soundscape.

At the same time a medium is a means to convey something and it is the intermediary going in-between passing over information. Music is not merely a subjective phenomena since it has an objective shareable presence even though its apparent form created by a musician always has a subjectively assessed aesthetic to it. As a means of sharing the beauty of feelings, music gives the subjective experience an undeniable substance within the objective reality.

SO let's layer these meanings in order. We have a source a crystal from which we only perceive reflections, fragmentations or perspective on it, but never the whole thing. But we are in it. We enter it. It's an environment we can interact with to convey our discoveries through it by making it audible and giving the coordinates of the specific view point via sounds, so that someone can look at it from the same angle.

It's important to notice that what people experience when they hear the notes is a felt experience of that particular perspective on the crystal, the medium makes itself apparent by taking on a specific form, but only the underlying medium as a whole can evoke an emotional resonance within us. The sounds are just superficially defined as the music, they’re not, they're just a felt sensation but the experienced feeling is what it's about. In the same way the noises we make with our mouths and call words aren’t the meaning, the meaning is in between the lines as a communication delivered with a specific intention derived from an experience.

The Medium always takes on the form of your current feeling which you channel through your instrument into the perceivable sound, the feeling is always felt by your own sentience and music is a reflection of your sentience, a cosmic crystal of felt experiences which all are valid and make sense within the higher order of harmony and beauty that allows it all to be in the first place.

Making music is not about penetrating the outer layers until you get to the core of that shiny egg its about realising that you are the core of it. All the playful manners from which all these informations in the form of sound are emitted is the radiance of your own presence. The goal is to completely surrender to your expression and dissolve into the medium and spill your creative power all over the place, inviting anyone who hears it to realise what we are. We convey what’s in there, through it, by highlighting different aspects of it, pointing towards the actual depths of the colourful abyss, appealing to the felt experience of it by a sentient being seeing behind the superficial expression of tones transforming it into music through the realisation of harmony that moves and describes us.

Basically Music as a Medium is a timeless Harmonically structured order that we interact with to remind us of the beauty that we’re inherently able to perceive and express. It’s like depicting our current mood in a film or painting that can be observed from a distance showing perfection in each minute detail despite the specific quality of the mood. It’s a perfection beyond good or bad devoid of our self-serving goals or judgement. Imagine a bad child's painting of a giraffe but when you look closer you realise that the paper and the strokes of the pen are all part of a magnificent fractal leading to the realisation that no matter what you’d paint its absolute perfection, and that is music.

All boiled down to one sentence:
Music isn't just pleasing sounds we hear with our ears, it is what we feel and even more so the fact that we feel.

I hope you enjoyed this little excursion into some potential perspectives on what music is. Of course this has barely scratched the surface there's a lot more to come. 😃