Harmonious Living

The last few weeks, especially during Spring Weekend, I had a lot of opportunities to listen and dance to live music with my friends, and I had a blast. Reading The Faith Instinct for my final project, I've been thinking about all this music, and about how the enjoyment of music may be at the route of humanity. I won't go too into the theory here, but basically what Wade proposes is that even before language, early human societies depended on repetitive rhythmic motion set to music to establish group cohesion. Basically, he claims that music and dance are at the core of the development of religion, language, and human society itself.

Depiction of a Navajo Fire Dance

With this idea that music significantly helped humanity develop, I've been thinking a lot about the ways that we reference music in our everyday language, and the significance we still attach to it. I love the word "harmony", for instance. Harmony is a state humans naturally look for, a state of coexistence, of peace. And while anything can exist in a state of harmony, what it refers to is simultaneous musical expression of consonant and dissonant sounds that produce a pleasing effect together. Having thought this through, I now have even more respect for the term harmony, understanding that it doesn't just refer to peaceful coexistence, it implies distinctly individual expression that combines to create something even better.
The phrase "dances to the beat of his own drum" and the word "discord", are two other examples of music translated into language, and while our deep instinctual understanding of music tells us that the peaceful coexistence of harmony is an inherently good thing, it tells us that something "discordant," composed of sounds that conflict in an unpleasant way, is bad. And I don't even know how to approach the "beat of his own" expression. I've always thought that the phrase was tinged pretty positively with the idea of individuality.
Thinking back to the beginning of civilization, however, when social groups were literally defined by those that danced to the beat of the same drum, dancing apart and differently wasn't such a good thing. This is a recurring theme in The Faith Instinct, of the increasing emphasis on individualism in the West, and how it may run contrary to our instincts. Last week I wrote about how the body needs social touching to tell it that it is established in a social group and therefore safe. Maybe we need music for that too. All I know is that I rarely feel more alive than when I am part of an energized crowd listening to good music.