In the middle of imagining the despair of Puritans, a beautiful song comes on the radio. It speaks to the immense wonder and mysteriousness of life; perhaps the underlying comfort that whilst we seem faced with much we cannot understand, it does, at certain moments, seem to possess an underlying benevolence we all take part in. There is a wise but not excessively humble girl several yards away from her house, staring out into the thickening, falling snow, simultaneously frightened by the suspicious silence beyond her yet, strangely assured of her capacity to navigate it; to sink into the snow beneath her.
I stop and wonder: could ever such a scene be produced on film with this music accompanying it? Would historians, film critics, and those who like to be critical for the pleasure of the activity scoff at the coupling of a scene of a Puritan girl with twenty-first century techno music behind it? Would the disconnect seem so jarring, that it would be considered ahistorical, an attempt to impress upon the inaccessible past the moments and emotions of today?
In my best moments, my greatest hope is that the answer is no. We are taught, as historians, to always assume that human experiences are conditioned by context, by culture; emotions and sentiments are just one of a handful of things we take for granted as universal, as shared by humanity, when really it is all dependent, relative.
But I believe music sometimes has the power to disprove this. There is an old Confucian saying, “The ritual divides, the music unites,” by which is meant that tradition and culture keeps people, classes, in the separate and appropriate places; but to think of music, to listen to music, is to dwell in the shared experience of mankind. Much music might sound a little odd at first – we are conditioned to prefer what our place and time produces – but if you give most music a chance to sink in, usually one will get past the awkward beats and unfamiliar melody, and then can hear it; hear what might have appealed to those who originally composed it, originally dwelt within the meaning it allowed them to access.
My own experience with music bears this out; there are so few types of music I cannot grasp onto, cannot find some inspiration or delicious fantasy in. And as much as I believe that much of what we take for granted is, indeed conditioned and constructed, I am not only a member of an academic community but a human one – and in moments like these, when I suddenly find my hunched over studying self transported to an imagined scene of the past where, I can vividly see, and feel, someone experience something that makes sense both in their context and mine – in those moments, I’d like to think there are things we share past our particular contexts; and that we can sometimes hear those things in music.
Written to: Trilogy (song), by ATB; of which someone’s relatively nifty music video (minus the anime stuff) of is bellow.
