Musicians we.

Dear readers,

95th post! we're steadily counting up to that wonderful first three-digit number!
in this post, tkwek keeps it simple with a short essay about what it means to be a musician.
still no photos or korea posts, but well, at least here's something to contend with.

enjoy!

and yes, FM 96.3 is recommended for late-night listening. music interludes are nice.

Sing to the dawn
The Straight Times Editor

Music maketh the man.

At first glance, even this age-old saying sounds like it’s been meddled with. After all, since the days of our coyote-mimicking and flint-cracking ancestors, it’s been man who’s been making music – man who changed the harp into the erhu, into the rebec, into the fiddle, and into the violin; man who transformed Nestorian monophony into the Baroque suite, the Classical sonata, the Romantic lieder and finally the 20th-century blues. The intricate inventions, powerful tone poems and swinging jazz rhythms were all, by God’s grace, created in the mind of man. Yet it seems that at the end of the day, whether a man is a musician or not, it’s up to his musicality.

Music, they say, maketh the man.

What makes us musicians? We don’t have special IDs with our violins and pianos plastered over them, we don’t have dog-tags around the neck that designate our passion. And even at the risk of sounding elitist, not everyone who plays an instrument is a musician, but, for that matter, not all musicians play an instrument.

Recently, after being released late from class, I was with a best friend on our daily recess chit-chats in the canteen, wolfing down our snacks as time wolfed down the remaining five minutes of our recess. It was a Friday, and every Friday during recess, the helpful prefects in the room upstairs would play music over the speakers. This music usually spanned a wide variety of popular pieces, covering rock, neoclassical, soft rock and pretty much every style under the sun.
“You know, Theo,” he remarked to me while wiping the spaghetti sauce from his cheek, “I read somewhere that wherever musicians go, if there’s music playing in the background, they will naturally walk to the beat of the music.”

Surprisingly, it was true. My eyes filtered down to my own limbs, which were pacing the canteen at a steady andante. I looked around the tuck-shop and spotted a number of my friends from the string ensemble. They, too, were similarly possessed. All of a sudden, the piece changed, and a rap came on. Those friends of mine immediately accelerated into a vivace, and did I – or did I not – feel a tiny adrenaline surge in my veins?

Well, we musicians can’t deny it, but there is something about our bodies that corresponds to the rhythms in the worlds around us. The music flows in us – it seems that our auditory faculties and our motion coordinators are inseparable, there’s a part of every one of us that can’t concentrate without a song in the background, can’t jog without our favorite beat, and can’t express happiness in any other way but by whistling a merry tune. We can’t escape the fact that music affects every facet of our lives – waves of sadness overcome us at appassionato passages, and our hearts give a leap with every scherzando on that invisible score.

Our every action is governed by music; our every move is a dance.

That’s not to say, of course, that we are completely affected by our surroundings and have no voice of ourselves, because at the heart of music-making is still creativity. It takes that spark to hum a counter-melody to a movie soundtrack, to train the mouth to mimic a drum set, or to blend in with whichever group is performing and to become a moving, cohesive mass with them. Music is not about melting into the background and following the predominant beat, but it’s about unleashing a creative side of us that can take on the challenge of carrying on and improving the beats that already exist. It’s not just about following the beat; it’s about being the beat.

Let me end of with an anecdote from my visit to South Africa a couple of years back. One of our dinners was held at the Carnivores Restaurant, Johannesburg, where we got to sample various exotic meats such as crocodile, leopard, wildebeest and ostrich. Halfway through the meal I looked up, and by one of those coincidental tricks of light, my eyes fell on a young African waiter who was standing by our table.

Arms crossed, leaning against the wooden pillars, he was the picture of steadfastness and strength, but on closer observation, I found that he was moving his fingers and feet in time to the soundtrack that was being played over the speakers. Steadily drumming against the pillar, he swayed to the rhythms, and watching him, I could just imagine the same man, miles removed from the urban restaurant, tapping an intricate dance beat on a hide-and-bone drum in a tent on the Kalahari. And immediately, I knew I’d found a kindred spirit.

For we were both musicians.