MUSIC & POETRY

Barb has provided us with one of her poems which touches on her experience of music bringing together the explicit and implicit worlds. In the book I am reading, The Master and His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist, I find that he has shown how the right hemisphere of the brain contributes to our ability to discern in music and poetry the implicit world which is opaque to the left hemisphere which attends to the explicit world. Barb's poem begins with the explicit - the contract, time consciousness, empty seats. Playing the music begins the transition to a different type of experience where the Wedding integrates all into a whole which is more than the sum of the parts.

The Master and His Emissary, Page 72
 
(M)usic is the natural candidate for the concerns of the right hemisphere. It is the relations between things, more than entities in isolation, that are of primary importance to the right hemisphere. Music consists entirely of relations of 'betweenness.' The notes mean nothing in themselves; the tensions between notes, and between notes and the silence with which they live in reciprocal indebtedness, are everything. Melody, harmony and rhythm each lie in the gaps, and yet the betweenness is only what it is because of the notes themselves. Actually the music is not just in the gaps any more than it is just in the notes: it is the whole that the notes and silence make together. Each note becomes transformed by the context in which it lies. What we mean by music is not just any agglomeration of notes, but one in which the whole created to make each note live in a new way, a way that it had never done before. Similarly poetry cannot be just any arrangement of words, but one in which each word is taken up into a new whole and made to live again in a new way, carrying us back to the world of experience, to life: poetry constitutes a 'speaking silence.' Music and poetic language are both part of the world that is delivered by the right hemisphere, the world characterized by betweenness. Perhaps it is not, after all, not so wide off the mark to call the right hemisphere the 'silent' hemisphere: its utterances are implicit."   

The two hemispheres of the brain complement each other. Singing provides the left half of the brain with words which it's language skills use to add another dimension to the enjoyment.

King's Singers - In the Real Early Morning

"In the real early morning

With the sun slowly rising
I was walking out slowly
Wandering free
When out in the distance
Over the valley
I saw an old friend
Waiting for me
Waiting for me

She was a young girl
She was an old soul
As fair as the ocean
Timeless and free
She was my mother
She was my daughter
She was my lover
She was everything
An old friend could be

I said it's been such a long time
Since we have spoken
There's so much to say to you
I want you to know
Wish you could tell me
All that you've seen here
But we haven't got long now
For soon you'll be fading
And soon I must go

She said you are a soldier
You are a father
You are a wise man
You are a friend
You were my first love
I won't forget you
I'm walking beside you
I was here when you started
I'll be here till the end

And now it's evening
There's a moon slowly rising
There isn't much more that
I wanted to know (wanted to know)

And I am alone now
She isn't beside me no more
But I feel no sorrow
I'll come tomorrow
I'll be on my way home
I'll be on my way home

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriter: Jacob Collier