Episode 4: Entry Date 09/10/02

Good Music: Learning from life's experience

What is good music?

As a musician, relating this question to what I do is one of the hardest things I have ever experienced. It has been a question I gave up on and saved myself the disillusionment I have seen so many other artists face. The following paragraphs are not really answering this question but it is (I hope) strengthening an argument that propagates the question's uselessness.According to me, there is a spiritual battle being fought. Don't ask me where, why, how or even amongst whom but all I feel is this underlying tension that cannot be of this earth. Of course, when I refer to 'spiritual' I am simply referring to something that is not overt to the human being.

When a judgment is made on what is good and bad in music this spiritual struggle is brought to life in my mind and I am taken to a place that illustrates the constant anguish a dejected artist feels.So far I know I am sounding more vague than anything else but as I go on I hope this anguish can be related in a more understandable way allowing me to vent this supernatural battle onto paper.I have talked to several people about music and their idea of good music. The answers I received have been extremely diverse in nature - to the extent of which I lost hope on any single school of thought. The questions are not about genre or style or taste - I realized that they go far beyond that, indulging in social, cultural, spiritual and emotional issues.My first, most elementary question was this. What should sound have in common in order for society to call it music? When I first searched for answers my knowledge on music limited me in my thought and I could come up with a very logical explanation.

All music must stick to a certain mood and convey a certain emotion through its life. All music should have a tempo that is even in nature and does not sway. All music must have more than one line of notes (polyphonic) and the leading line (melody line, soprano line or whatever you want to call it) must stick to a certain pattern. These logical rules governed me for exactly six months until I started exposing myself to radical forms of what society did call music as well. Musicians who played with melodies and twisted them enough for them to break all the rules I mentioned above. Rhythms that with every beat swayed further and further away from my definitions. Patterns and forms that I could not make logical even after years of thinking. The question was no longer whether the musician stuck to the rules. The question was how many times could he or she break them before you can separate music from anything else.

At this point of realization in my life I was listening to everything I could get my hands on. Things were opening up to me. I was hearing things I never heard before. I was feeling so much closer to sound. It was as if I was touched by something.Then came the ultimate knock out. After being severely engrossed by as much music as I could find, I was gradually realizing that everything was sounding great to my ears. Nature, animals, any human voice and any set of musical notes were expressing their beauty to me in ways I could not even fathom earlier. These experiences lead me to deduce that music is all about the listener. It is all about what we have been exposed to and how we have been exposed to them. If we don't like something it is not because that something is necessarily bad, it is because we cannot like it. It is our shortcoming not to be able to like it. The manifestation of human nature is music. But more than that, music is the manifestation of everything, even the spiritual.

Trying to put this into words is hard. But, I guess my ultimate point is this - To me, realizing art has always been an outwardly experience. And very often, after coming full circle I have realized art in things I used to take for granted. I learned never to do that again.

- Anuj