I love music.
Most music.
I can listen to Eddie Van Halen shred “Eruption” on a loop
or listen to Imagine Dragons, Metallica, Bon Jovi, Stevie Wonder, Aerosmith,
Alicia Keys, Eric Clapton, Aretha Franklin, Christina Aguilera, Lady Gaga, Queen,
Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, No Doubt, Rush, The Stones, Nirvana, The Who, Stevie
Nicks, U2, Taylor Swift, Lauryn Hill, Jimi Hendrix, Billy Joel, The
Decembrists, or most classical music for hours.
And I listen to a lot of classical music. When I write, I
prefer to listen to orchestral classical music or opera in Italian so that those words don’t get in the way of my words. I love everything about classical
music.
Except for the frickin’ violins.
But I’m a little odd. When I’m listening to music and close
my eyes, I see colors and shapes, and the music shifts around in front of me in
a way that is not related to the mixing for the speakers. I have synesthesia,
which means that I am “a synesthete.” It means that my sensory neurons interact
with each other in nontypical ways.
To be clear, I’m not autistic. I can read facial expressions
and body language and get inside other people’s heads to the point where it’s
creepy. I’ll make eye contact until you
look away. It’s some of my other neurons that are crossed. It’s just an unusual
way to experience the world. It’s not so much a sensory disability as a sensory
bonus prize.
I also hear music when I read, as the words have rhythm and
specific words have tones, and yes, I use it in my writing. I have to be
careful not to go too far into it because it can become incomprehensible to other
people, but either it has seeped into the language enough or that enough people
have a low level of synesthesia that just about everyone understands bright
treble musical notes and dark, mournful low tones. I gave synesthesia to one
character (Alexandre) so I could let it out and play with it. I reread Nabokov
ravenously.
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| "Hallelujah" by Melissa McCracken |
A fantastic artist and synesthete,
Melissa McCracken, paints what she
sees, and she does a remarkable job of transforming a four-dimensional
experience (three dimensions plus time) into a two-dimensional canvas. It’s the
best representation of what it’s like to have synesthesia that I’ve seen. I
don’t see exactly the same things, but when I saw this painting of
“Hallelujah,” I knew immediately that it must be Leonard Cohen’s song and could
not be the chorus from Handel’s
Messiah.
What I see is generally rounder and smoother, more like billowing fabric that
blossoms with colors, less spikey. I see different colors, but we both agree that the white in the foreground here is the most intense.
Classical music is especially friendly to synesthetes. The
first time my ballet teacher played proper classical music in class when I was
about six (Swan Lake), she could barely get me back to the barre because I was
pressing my head against the speaker. Some pop music is so busy with the
seven-second rule that it’s like watching a fireworks finale from inside a
popcorn popper for three and a half excruciating minutes. I’m a little more
tolerant than a lot of synesthetes in delving into pop music to find the
underlying elements and listening to those, but it’s still overwhelming
sometimes.
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| "Imagine" (John Lennon) |
But not all music or instruments are friendly to synesthetes
or to me as a synesthete.
Violins are especially problematic for me. I like classical
music, and I listen to a lot of symphonies and piano concertos, but I have
rarely listened to violin music, except for certain musicians. Within an
orchestra, the violins don’t bother me because the other instruments blend and
smooth away the problematic sounds, the buzz of the strings on the lower notes
and a shrill screech on the higher notes that are the higher harmonics of the
tone. The brass section is particularly important in blending out the painful tones.
I can only listen to three solo violinists: Jascha Heifetz, Itzhak
Perlman, and David Garrett.
That these three violinists play with a similar style isn’t
surprising. Itzhak Perlman has confirmed that
he’s
a synesthete, too, and David Garrett counts Perlman as one of his major
influences. For example, J.S. Bach’s “Sarabande,” I can only listen to those
three violinists play. Especially for the first few bars,
those first low,dissonant tones, listening to any other violinist is like iron-black,
silver-edged sawtooth spikes erupting from the ground all around me, and it
yanks down on my ears. It feels like someone stripping the nerves out of my
lower arms. It hurts. James Ehnes’s technique is supposedly flawless, but I
can’t listen to him play. I want to run my fingernails down a chalkboard and
chew aluminum foil afterward to get it out of my head. Joshua Bell’s colors are
monochromatic and flat, not nuanced, except when they’re shattering and like grating sandpaper on my palms.
And before anyone gets snarky about David Garrett, please
don’t. I don’t snark about people, especially other authors and other artists.
People are dismissive of him in bizarre and reactionary ways that seem little
based in reality. Yes, he’s pretty. Yes, he’s popular. Get over it and listen to
how he plays the damn violin. If you’re talking about his hair or his
cheekbones, then you’re falling into the same hype trap that you’re pretending
to disdain. Seriously, when I read a review of his music that mentions his
hair, I know the reviewer is an idiot. It’s exactly
the same thing as a review that gushes about his looks and doesn’t mention his
music but with a troll’s evil intent.
There are many reasons why Garrett is outselling other
classical musicians, and if you can’t figure out what they are, then you need
to sit down, set your preconceptions aside, and listen more deeply. Technique
is craft. Craft is the foundation of the arts, but mere technique is just
draftsmanship. It’s tracing another person’s painting and coloring by numbers.
Art is communication of what it means to be human, conveys
emotion, and causes an emotional change in the viewer/reader/listener.
Popularity is a measure of the effectiveness of communication. If no one responds,
it isn’t art. If a lot of people respond, it is the very definition of art.
Close your eyes and listen to Garrett play
Bach’s
Sonata No. 2, here. I don’t think I drew a breath for three minutes while I
listened to this because I didn’t want the rushing of the air in my head to
interfere with hearing it. Listen to that
emotion.
Expressivity like that is
art.
A very smart friend of mine said, “I think a lot of
commoners,” she was speaking of herself, bless her heart, “are put off by
classical music because they won't be valued as fans because they can't give a
technical 'educated' commentary. The genre is set up to make Joe Average feel
inferior.”
Garrett doesn’t talk down to his audience like most
classical performers do. He gives them something familiar and that is widely
understood, like Metallica or Michael Jackson, and then he shows them
connections to classical music. That’s brilliant. That’s communication, and that’s
art.
All artists work with the tools of craft and the inspiration
and ride the blinding lightning bolt of art. Some are better at one than the
other. It is easier to explain why artists with better technique are “better,”
because technique can be objectively and rather easily explained, and it is
what can be taught. It’s why the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (my alma mater, don’t
want people to think I’m randomly bashing an MFA program,) concentrates on
dissecting and discussing prose at the word- and sentence-level. Technique is
easy to discuss.
Art is almost impossible to quantify or to explain. A lot of
my friends (after I have ruthlessly converted them to being David Garrett fans,
but they became freaky-psychotic fans all on their own,) have said that they
don’t know a lot about classical music, but they know how they feel when they
listen to Garrett play.
That’s art.
