I frequently fall in love with music, but this one
crush-level above the normal. I remember the feeling of picking up a cassette
tape with John Coltrane's "Love Surpreme" at a gas-station after a
really rainy fly-fishing trip in the mountains years ago. This track contains
some of that haunting drive that would play in my mind long after the music had
stopped. Perhaps not as experimental, but none the less.
A descriptive and under-used word for music that has
struck me in recent years is "severity": When a piece of music is
dark, perhaps in a minor key and with a strong sense of rhythm and forward movement;
it has strong elements (melody or otherwise) that you cannot help but immersing
yourself in — but! it does not put you in a dark mood! Rather, it puts you in a
heavy contemplative mood. It unlocks the compartments of the mind that deals
with existence, respect, meaning and perhaps even love. But in the case of
love, in the sense of understanding its foundations; not joyfully, not sadly,
but inquisitively.
Music that brings out the "severity" of life
makes you straighten your back and bend your mind. It makes you neither happy
or sad, but it sets you on a journey in gloomy light through the corridors of
the foundations of the constructions that brings us light — and firm points of
reference for our journey through life.
*
In ‘The Grain of the Voice’ Roland Barthes reflects on
a lacking parameter of musicology. He calls it the grain that you can find in a performer’s voice. The term is more
elusive than, say, harmony and
perhaps a hard term to discuss with objectivity. But it adds to our terminology
something that studying a score cannot lead us to. Likewise, severity is my Barthesian contribution
to terms that might help us think outside the established vocabulary of musical
understanding.
Perhaps there are stronger examples, and perhaps I should
make a whole playlist to explain more properly, but here is at least one
recording that fits the term.
