Ode to joy – The Power of Music

By Gita Saraydarian


I was inspired to write about my experiences with music after I read the following in the Economist January 15, 2009 issue By Charles Berry:

SIR – I appreciated your article on human evolution and music (“Why music?”, December 20th). However, I am a composer and none of the theories you posited helped explain my evolutionary development. I do not compose symphonies to get the girl. (I did play guitar songs to woo the girl in my teens, but with very limited success.) Indeed, you missed the vital reason why humans create and listen to music: joy.
Your suggestion that “little else would change” if music “vanished from the species” assumes no tangible loss of joy, which is relevant to human activity. Joy is both a perception of and response to beauty. We perceive beauty in all manner of diversity: a sunrise, a trout flashing in a stream, the grand impression of a 1965 Mustang in cherry condition; and we create beauty in ten thousand ways, all of which are important. Like visual art and dance, music remains an expression of human thought, separate from, and perhaps deeper than, our written or spoken languages.
Beauty must surely be essential to our lives and our evolution, even though the perception and creation of beauty are two abilities in human evolution that have nothing to do with sex, or social clans, or “cheesecake”.

This letter touched a cord in me! We need joy, we need beauty as much as we need air and water and food. Music is inherent in nature and we yearn for it and search for it and if it is not there, we create it by humming, tapping, walking, or just straining our ears to listen for that sound from outside that brings a certain rhythm to our ears. I cannot conceive of a life without music; I don't think we can have life without music.

I love all kinds of music. My father was a composer and musician and we had all kinds of music in our home all the time. Some music “sticks” to me and I find myself humming it all day, and some fly over me never to be remembered or thought of again. Some irritate me; others uplift me. Some put me in a romantic and quiet mood; others in a jumping-dancing mood. Some put me in a worship and introspective mood; others in a drive with the windows open with the radio blasting mood! Why one leaves such an impression and others do not is a worthwhile question to ask. More than the mechanics of the musical composition itself, I think it is the entire mood and time that is captured and encapsulated. That particular moment may give us tremendous joy or any number of complex feelings, all depending on the moment of imprint. Joy is no small thing in our life and it is what gets us through all that we face in life. Joy helps us survive life!

Think of the song “Stand by Me” and listen to it on the website “Playing for Change.” I saw this group on Television and the tune is still playing in my mind. I love the song and especially love the various renditions by people from all over the world. Listen to it and I promise you, you will be up and dancing in no time: http://www.playingforchange.com/pop.html

When I was a young girl and my mother would find me in a teenager's funky mood, she would simply play a flamenco album on our record player. Yes, we had a record player and the album in question was a red-colored, clear plastic album! I loved that album and it was a collection of some beautiful flamenco music. I would be up and dancing in no time, all my cares flew out the window, and my teenage pains or sorrows evaporated just as quickly! She knew how music affected me, especially the kind I could dance to. She never lost time with words or tried to coax me out of my moods. She simply played music. Sometimes she would break into song herself to change the mood around our house. My mother could sing with a beautiful soprano voice; but that is another story about my mother that I need to write.

I still feel the same way when I hear any kind of flamenco music. I have to get up, get my castanets out, and start dancing! It is healing and joyful and beautiful and full of life. I have to respond in singing or dancing and that makes the music come alive for me. I dance to whatever music moves me. That is how I experience music. Armenians celebrate anything with dance; dance is a national response mechanism to any kind of human emotion - sadness or joy, loss or sorrow, birth or death. Any kind of gathering can easily break into song and dance. Men, women, children of all ages will get up and spontaneously start dancing. I have this in my genes and I celebrate it wholeheartedly. I remember watching old ladies who could hardly move get up and start swaying to Armenian music. One old lady in particular could hardly move but managed to stand in place, close her eyes, and move her arms and sway to the rhythm of the song with a dreamy smile on her face! The lady in question was my first dance teacher and is still lively well into her late 80's.

Often, our life is punctuated by a special song or a special piece of music. The sounds imprint an image or a memory or a narrative of our life at that particular moment and it is frozen in time and place. Every time we hear even a few notes of that song, we instantly remember the time and place and immediately the entire picture is alive once again with all its corresponding feelings in our physical life, our emotions, and our thoughts and memories and expectations. Everything associated with that song is imprinted in one large mosaic. It is so beautiful and so complex and so whole! Our auditory memory is powerful and produces profound feelings.

The song does not have to be in a language we understand. I listen to songs in Turkish, Chinese, and Portuguese. I love some operas and can't understand the meaning of all the words. I find songs in different languages equally compelling. I listen to Turkish songs and find myself humming the melody and punctuating my humming with a few words that I remember. (Yes, my mother also played Turkish songs in our home and it is a part of our life and our gatherings to this day. Maybe Armenians and Turks can get together and just dance? Maybe we can heal our life just by dancing; stop the talking and the blaming? Now there is an idea; but I am sure someone has already thought of it!)

I now try not to feel sad with songs that bring sad memories. Over the years, I have tried hard to “re frame” those periods of sad memories and put them into perspective so that they no longer elicit heavy sadness but rather a nice memory of human frailties and human vulnerabilities. We could celebrate our humanity in all the feelings that we have. Sadness and feelings of loss or regret could bring up an inner joy that is not happiness nor sadness, but rather a subtle smile or a subtle knowing that we have crossed those borders of raw feeling and somehow, we have survived them. Once we “re frame” those periods, we no longer feel specifically sad , but rather the joy of knowing life: the quiet smile, the inner sense of peace, or the inner sense of wisdom that comes with age and graying. It is in some way a comfortable stage to be in as the edges of life lose their sharpness and become more rounded with time.

The joy comes from knowing that I made it and survived that crisis. Or, what I thought was a crisis is no longer holding that same intensity as it did in the past. This is why I so appreciated what Mr. Berry said in his letter to the editor; music brings joy to us and joy cannot be taken away from us and it does not depend on anything other than the inner response to something inexplicably touching and beautiful.

Healing our memories is a good thing; it is not the erasing of memory but rather coming to terms with that part of ourselves that is satisfying. How do we know we are growing up and maturing? By the way we address those sharp edges of our memories. That is according to me!

I am continuously adding all kinds of new memories of music. Every year, I help organize a retreat and conference for my spiritual work and we deliberately schedule times of singing and dance (these are sacred songs and sacred dance). This part of spiritual gatherings are always the most loved and appreciated. As I travel and give seminars about the Wisdom Teachings, I observe how others experience the sacred in music. After listening to lectures for hours, people need to relax the intellectual mind and let their subtle natures come into play. Some people resist this at first and then quickly fall into the magic of it. People always understand the profound meaning of wisdom when they feel it with song, with music, with imagery that the song or music brings forth from them.

In a seminar on Other Worlds in Switzerland, after a particularly beautiful singing of the song “Beloved Lord” everyone fell silent and looked outside at the high Swiss mountains, then slowly turned and looked at me, in total silence. The song is so simple and is taken from a Sufi prayer with music added by Torkom Saraydarian. (Sacred Songs CD-a collection of sacred songs recorded by a non-professional church group.) The words, the sounds, the group energy was so high that words cannot describe it. In all that we do in our life, we are essentially trying to understand the profound connection to the spiritual universe that is really who we are. Music and singing bring us to the closest understanding of our divine heritage. Music gives us joy and it is the joy that lets us experience that inexplicable feeling of connectedness with other human beings, with all of life.

So, whatever you are feeling right now, get up and play a CD of your favorite music and dance any way you like. Your mood will be uplifted and you will feel beauty and joy, even if you are sad or hurting. The secret is this: music and dancing integrates us. You can heal your emotions and put your subtle bodies into a better rhythm if you can dance and feel the rhythm of life.

Tonight, I will dance and celebrate the end of the week with my sister and a bunch of teens and young-at-heart ladies. Young and old, we meet at my sister Helena's dance class. We stretch and jump and dance to some of the liveliest music you can imagine, some of which I would never know how to find or what it is called!!! I go home humming and swaying and the week's cares just melt away!

The Wisdom Teachings have always used music in worship and ceremony and ritual. Various musical forms and instruments stimulate various parts of our subtle bodies. Here is an excerpt from the book The Creative Sound by Torkom Saraydarian on how various musical instruments affect our bodies (page 77):
-Wind instruments affect the emotions
-Brass instruments affect the etheric body and the emotions
-Strings are kama-manasic, in nature; they affect the higher emotions and lower mind
-Piano music affects the abstract mind, the atmic level, and also the lower or concrete mind
-Drums affect the etheric centers
-The santur affects the emotions and the Intuition
-The harp affects the subconsciousness and the Chalice
-The voice can act on all levels, according to the level of the singer or the listener


I hope you can enjoy some music and dance tonight!

Gita
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-Mr. Berrys' letter is reprinted by his permission.
-Gita Saraydarian is the Founder and President of TSG Foundation, an organization dedicated to the Ageless Wisdom Teachings. For a complete list of past blogs and other writings, click here.
Copyright Notice: Gita’s Blog articles are copyrighted by The Creative Trust, 2009.