Whence the melody? Whence the beat? The evening breeze stops, pauses, changes gear. On the cusp of change a scrap of melody squeezes through and whispers in my ear. Just a scrap, hardly a phrase, and then it’s gone. With the wind. But in that fleeting moment, I know that I know it, I know [...]

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Wandering minstrel

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Whence the melody? Whence the beat?

The evening breeze stops, pauses, changes gear. On the cusp of change a scrap of melody squeezes through and whispers in my ear. Just a scrap, hardly a phrase, and then it’s gone. With the wind. But in that fleeting moment, I know that I know it, I know its face: it’s like an index entry, a pointer to something lying deep in my memory.

The foot taps and I am on a journey. The song is many, many years old. Someone had sung it when I was a child. I worry the faint memory, searching for the roots. This goes on for a few days till, piece by piece, the puzzle falls into place and I recapture the melody and even bits of the words.

“Journey into the interior.”….. “Down there on a visit.”

It is the beat that gets me, first. That, I can understand. There is a beat in us: our heartbeat. And the memory of a mother’s heartbeat, the comforting throb in the silence of the womb. But is that all the infant hears? Before and after birth? Recently a musicologist said that the African child is conceived, nurtured and raised in rhythm “Pestles pounding, dance, and singing [conveys] rhythm to [the] foetus. The first communication between a mother and child is music. Music follows us from the womb to the tomb.”

Yes, it begins with the beat.

But it’s not the beat that intrigues me. It’s the melody. There is always a melody, a memory of a song, running through my head. Not the same melody, not the same tune, but a piece of music that is in me. Always there. I am not conscious of it, but it is like a background. Unconsciously I begin to tap along with it. First the basic beat, and then the variations. I become aware, try to follow it, pin it down. Doesn’t work. As soon as the conscious mind steps in, tries to control it, the rhythm stops. Iambic pentameter, trochaic tetrameter… all become bland blank verse. The melody works only with the unconscious mind.

My tapping annoys others, and I cannot understand why: I am keeping the tap inaudible, using only the pads of my fingers but even then…….

From where comes this music? Sometimes it’s a melody, sometimes words appear, and I play around them, changing them – the words, not the music.

Sometimes a melody will not leave me for many days: I wake up with it and carry it with me through the day and into bed. Sometimes the tune changes: several times a day. Always prompted by some cue, I do not always know what.

Once, I tried to use the music ingrained in memory, to breach a wall of silence. My Uncle’s 100-year but yet lucid mind was trapped inside a decaying body: vision, hearing, breathing were all too laboured. Music had long mattered to him but now he could not even join in the talk swirling around round him: yet he wanted to be there, an almost silent participant. Our talk was “oxygen” to him. But he could no longer hear music.

I thought I would try to make a small, short-lived crack in the wall of silence that had grown around him. I took along my laptop and earphones, linked them to him, and played the songs of Sunil Shantha on my hard disk. Only he, wired to the source, heard the music and only I knew what was happening – till his eyes opened wide, he smiled, and he started singing along, revelling in the old melodies! Remembered Melody had squeezed through the crack in a moment of magic, but only to “…..Swell out and fail, as a door / Were shut between me and the sound.”

It was joyful but, yes, the door slammed shut. He did not see his next birthday. But Uncle’s link to music was not mine. The melody in my mind works at an unconscious level.

It’s a wandering minstrel who sings for his supper with a song and goes his way next morning leaving behind a lingering memory: a memory of the song, not the singer. That memory is not part of the formal, organized files and folders of the mind. It wanders in and goes with the wind – unless I grab it by the scruff of its neck and worry it till it stands still.

Why do melodies linger, remembered melodies that cannot be heard…..?

 

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