Sunday, November 23, 2014

The Language

"Music is the language of the soul."

This is the phrase that drives the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix, Arizona. More than mere marketing lingo, it is a statement the proprietors of the museum believe in and demonstrate with remarkable acuity.
Drums galore.

With more than 10,000 individual musical instruments of every conceivable (and inconceivable) shape, size, and fashion on display - organized geographically according to their lands of origin - the MIM is a genuinely eye-opening and overwhelming experience. It blends history along with ethnicity and community to demonstrate music's beautifully dualistic nature: music is simultaneously universal (all people groups across the world have their own) and culturally unique.

And it is this amazing amount of diversity amongst a shared passion for musical language that makes such a clear, powerful statement. The same basic elements of music are always present: percussion & rhythm, melody, harmony. But how those concepts are expressed end up as manifold & numerous as the different people expressing them. It is a rather quickening experience, to be sure, to stand in front of a display and, as a musician, recognize what is happening in front of you but find yourself so blown away by its astonishing otherness that you barely recognize it. And then, to realize a moment later that there are plenty of other people living on this planet who would find the voices & sounds of rock 'n' roll and jazz - so familiar to me - as bizarre as I find theirs.

Music is universal, but there is no universally relatable genre. No style has a monopoly on accessibility: all of the different variations of musical expression are as wildly diverse as the languages we literally speak, and the musicians themselves as diverse as those languages' individual speakers.

And so my mind took all of these wonderful concepts and ran with them. I arrived at a couple of conclusions you will learn about if you can find it within yourself to keep reading (hint, hint).



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