The Places Music Can Take You

“Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on the heights. I only wanted to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.”
-Edvard Grieg

This week’s post is going to be short and sweet, as it’s my birthday and I’d rather be out and about but I promised myself I would do these diligently every Tuesday (wedding/honeymoon weeks excluded). Today’s topic is one of certain passion for me, because I will be discussing the very reason I enjoy music as much as I do and why it is such a central part of my life.

Humans, since the romantic era, have always been finding ways to desperately get back to what it feels like to be primally human. A life with simple village living, a life of magic and witchcraft, and a life of being one with nature yet again. This longing for the simpler life of the past has not faded from our modern cultures at all, and if anything, it has only intensified as we become even more distanced from our beginnings. So, naturally, we look to our arts and literature as our primary vehicle that takes us to these fantasized settings.

Music and art has always been a means of taking ourselves out of our modern lives and putting us in a more fantastical state of mind. Books and movies have the advantage of having infinite amounts of freedom with words, script, narration, and screenplay to take the viewer or reader from towering mountain ranges to endless desert, or from a city of the future to a village of the ancient past in five seconds of screen time or in one page of a book. For music, the fact that so much is left up to the listener’s imagination when a piece is trying to take us somewhere is what makes it a much more personal and intimate experience for each listener, but so much of a challenge for a composer or musician. Music can take the listener to all of these places as well, yet may only accomplish the setting and pathos in mind with sounds and limited poetic decoration. Show two people the same movie, and they watch the same experience. Give two people a chapter in a book, and the experience is slightly different and left to the imagination with the same guiding hand of the author. Give two people Kurt Atterberg’s Cello Concerto however, and the listeners will both have very different imaginative experiences and can very easily be taken to two completely different settings by listening to the same music. This is what, to me, makes music as special as it is.

Music, in this way, takes us to different places each time we listen to the same piece of music. Each time I have listened to Ole Bull’s “Saeterjentens Sondag” I am taken to a different Norwegian mountainside, or each time I listen to Ola Gjeillo’s “Tundra” I imagine a different icy landscape under the northern lights or different creatures that inhabit it under a midnight sun. This is what makes music such a supernatural experience for the listener, in that the same piece of music can take the same person to a thousand different places after a thousand different listens.

Yet, it doesn’t have to be a different place every time. If I want to be given a front row seat to Thor’s battle with the Jormangandr at the edge of the world, I can put on Amon Amarth’s “Twilight of the Thundergod” and be taken there immediately. If I want to be sent to the tragic frontlines of the bitter Battle of Poltava between Sweden and Russia, Sabaton’s “Poltava” can take me there by armed cavalry. What if I don’t want action, and I simply want to be put in the middle of the woods for some ancient viking ritual? Put on Wardruna and let “Fehu” put you in front of that hide drum and entrance you completely.

Music has been, and always will be, a very special art form for various reasons. It can talk to a million different people about a million different things and give every human being on this earth a form of comfort. Not only can it give you comfort, but it can give you a place to hang up your coat and stay for a while. Whether you want to be in Bach’s castle in the heavens, or Grieg’s fishing cottage down in the fjord, music can take you there, and it can make you feel right at home wherever you end up.