Deleted Notes & Queries Response: Why is listening to music pleasant?
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The comment has since been deleted from the website.
This blog is obviously not affiliated with The Guardian. Its reference to a question that appeared in Notes & Queries is presented under the terms of fair use.
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Why is listening to music pleasant?
I find that, as I get older, certain pieces of music merge with my internal biography and are thereafter inseparable from these points in space and time. The great unseen labour of my life has been a constellation of brief, yet potent, memories that can be rekindled by the right configuration of notes and vocal melodies. A neurologist in possession of the wherewithal to observe this process as it unfolds, might observe the crude foundational outline of a human soul staked out in architecture of a living brain.
The memories evoked are bittersweet: The knowledge that I was there to experience a moment are always infused with inextricable sadness for what has been lost to history and can never be recreated, but only revisited in the mind.
Places will also conjure memories of certain pieces of music that were either heard there, or are associated with that location for more obscure and convoluted reasons.
By way of convenient example, the last time that I visited Poplar, I took the long shortcut between Angell Street and Eardley Street, that passes, North to South, straight through the interior of St Angela's Cathedral. It actually takes marginally less time to go around the houses and I have never been able to work out why this is. Logic exerts a weak influence over this corner of the city.
St Angela's is a cathedral in the same way that Pluto is a planet – in the popular consensus, in quiet defiance to the will of those who authoritatively apply such definitions. People began referring to the church as a cathedral in everyday conversation and so it became one.
The choral wings of the stone angels that emerge as a scattered flock high around the internal walls, from where they cast strange birdlike shadows, form the notes of a trio of architectural scores that are sympathetic to the vaulted acoustics of the building. At certain points it is possible to graduate from one score to the next to create different variations.
It was enough for Colin Killick, who was visiting from Orkney, to wonder out loud whether Treloar – the principle architect of the cathedral – could have added composer to his prodigious list of talents.
I reminded him: “Treloar only had one ear.”
“Ah, but that was his genius. He designed the cathedral as a secondary ear.”
It's a nice story but the sonatas that emerge from the walls of the cathedral on the wings of angels were composed as the building went up, to be sympathetic to the surrounding structure. True, they are a by-product of the design, however the music is incidental and part of a game that was played by the men who were tasked with bringing Treloar's drawings to life. They cannot be attributed to one composer but to many, working independently of each other.
I passed through the cathedral on that May morning, dappled by the shadows of the massed Heavenly Host. It reminded me of John Czarnecki, who played the violin, and Megan Sandie, fifty years his junior, who played the cello. Together they would perform the scores engaged into the cathedral architecture, perched on the wooden turntable that one of the caretakers had unwillingly dragged to the centre of the flagstone cross, between the nave and the choir; shuffling themselves clockwise or anti-clockwise with their feet (for the scores are palindromic and form coherent pieces of music whether they are played forward or in reverse), with John missing out bits because his eyesight was going and some of the angels were lost in the gloom where he could no longer see them. He would sheepishly remark upon how, the older he got, the simpler the scores became. They would even play behind the impenetrable din of the organ though it rendered them deaf and dumb to their own music.
One of the reason that a person might visit a cathedral is because the prospect of being alone in the universe is too terrible a thing to contemplate. There is perhaps no simpler and more poignant example of humankind unified towards some higher purpose than a pair of like-minded souls, willingly bound into service to a piece of music, using it to explore those intangible realms of the human experience that lie beyond the reach of words, sharing the same thoughts and feelings at the same time.
Now both have been washed away by an event that has taken so many unexpectedly. Though Czarnecki is laid beneath the ground and Sandie has been scattered on the winds, I find that I can only think of them together.
Walking across the church, I could hear the wheels of Sandie's cello case aligned to the mortar joins between the flagstones, anticipating the sudden skips where a stone was shattered at the corner. The organ was being serviced. The 27000 pipes whined stingily as I made my way through and did not linger.
I hope this is of help.
The memories evoked are bittersweet: The knowledge that I was there to experience a moment are always infused with inextricable sadness for what has been lost to history and can never be recreated, but only revisited in the mind.
Places will also conjure memories of certain pieces of music that were either heard there, or are associated with that location for more obscure and convoluted reasons.
By way of convenient example, the last time that I visited Poplar, I took the long shortcut between Angell Street and Eardley Street, that passes, North to South, straight through the interior of St Angela's Cathedral. It actually takes marginally less time to go around the houses and I have never been able to work out why this is. Logic exerts a weak influence over this corner of the city.
St Angela's is a cathedral in the same way that Pluto is a planet – in the popular consensus, in quiet defiance to the will of those who authoritatively apply such definitions. People began referring to the church as a cathedral in everyday conversation and so it became one.
The choral wings of the stone angels that emerge as a scattered flock high around the internal walls, from where they cast strange birdlike shadows, form the notes of a trio of architectural scores that are sympathetic to the vaulted acoustics of the building. At certain points it is possible to graduate from one score to the next to create different variations.
It was enough for Colin Killick, who was visiting from Orkney, to wonder out loud whether Treloar – the principle architect of the cathedral – could have added composer to his prodigious list of talents.
I reminded him: “Treloar only had one ear.”
“Ah, but that was his genius. He designed the cathedral as a secondary ear.”
It's a nice story but the sonatas that emerge from the walls of the cathedral on the wings of angels were composed as the building went up, to be sympathetic to the surrounding structure. True, they are a by-product of the design, however the music is incidental and part of a game that was played by the men who were tasked with bringing Treloar's drawings to life. They cannot be attributed to one composer but to many, working independently of each other.
I passed through the cathedral on that May morning, dappled by the shadows of the massed Heavenly Host. It reminded me of John Czarnecki, who played the violin, and Megan Sandie, fifty years his junior, who played the cello. Together they would perform the scores engaged into the cathedral architecture, perched on the wooden turntable that one of the caretakers had unwillingly dragged to the centre of the flagstone cross, between the nave and the choir; shuffling themselves clockwise or anti-clockwise with their feet (for the scores are palindromic and form coherent pieces of music whether they are played forward or in reverse), with John missing out bits because his eyesight was going and some of the angels were lost in the gloom where he could no longer see them. He would sheepishly remark upon how, the older he got, the simpler the scores became. They would even play behind the impenetrable din of the organ though it rendered them deaf and dumb to their own music.
One of the reason that a person might visit a cathedral is because the prospect of being alone in the universe is too terrible a thing to contemplate. There is perhaps no simpler and more poignant example of humankind unified towards some higher purpose than a pair of like-minded souls, willingly bound into service to a piece of music, using it to explore those intangible realms of the human experience that lie beyond the reach of words, sharing the same thoughts and feelings at the same time.
Now both have been washed away by an event that has taken so many unexpectedly. Though Czarnecki is laid beneath the ground and Sandie has been scattered on the winds, I find that I can only think of them together.
Walking across the church, I could hear the wheels of Sandie's cello case aligned to the mortar joins between the flagstones, anticipating the sudden skips where a stone was shattered at the corner. The organ was being serviced. The 27000 pipes whined stingily as I made my way through and did not linger.
I hope this is of help.
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| image generated by Craiyon |
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