Storytelling and communication – why music sticks

Anne Rasmusen’s exploration of music in Islam, as both a ritual service and as a distinct art form, are utterly fascinating to me. Music in general holds a place in my life that I can’t fathom the words to describe, an emotional catalyst that follows me – surprises me – makes me feel things in ways I’ve never felt before.

I consider myself a visual artist, sketches and paintings have always been my domain, but they’ve never moved me to tears or forced a smile onto my face – music has the power to do that. The biological explanations of our taste in music are, as of now, not well understood. Some claim it has something to do with our appreciation for the beats of our loved ones hearts when we were carried in our early primate days. Some claim it’s an emergent property of our communal nature – beats and rhythms can coordinate us, bring us together, encode cultural information.

To me, these explanations don’t suffice. I think there’s something deeper to music, something that makes it sit in a world apart from the visual and the culinary. Music is something we can create on a whim, easily, using nothing but our hands, our voice, or the tapping drum-beats of teeth (Is that just me?). It’s an art that is more or less universal, and it has to be – sound is how almost all humans communicate, so it makes sense that we attribute so much emotion and meaning to it.

Similar to the religious songs of Islam, many early religions paired music and storytelling intrinsically – the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh is thought to have been accompanied by instrumentation, as were the epic poems of Homer in ancient Greece – and it makes perfect sense why. We use our voice to convey meaning and emotion, so by finely modulating our voices and accompanying them with the ethereal plucking of early stringed instruments, we can create a tale that is hyper-emotive, an experience somehow more real than reality itself.

Music occupies a space of true cultural magic. It’s been with us since the dawn of time, and I hope it sticks with us to the bitter end – If we’re on the way out, we better have a killer outro.