Morality of Music

People who have been around for a while may recall my occasional bewilderment about how I went from a permanent headphones-hair teenager/college kid to finding music so overwhelming when in the background of another activity that I often have to use noise canceling headphones with nothing playing in order to concentrate.

This continues to mystify me, and the mystery continues to deepen.

As with many layers of spirituality, I have come to wonder whether this change is due to growth or discovery. That is, have I become increasingly sensitive to music over time, or have I always been this sensitive to music and am just discovering it now? Was I deliberately overloading myself when I was younger? Have my years increased my sensitivity to input, or have they increased my awareness of the input?

This morning, I began to discover another layer to this.

In the mobile computing era, I have come to use various kinds of ambient sound the way I used compositional music before, as background. But it occurs to me I have long been attracted not just to ambient music — some of which only differs aesthetically from this software stuff in that it’s recorded and thus the same every time — as well as non-Western musical forms that are, for lack of a better word, “contemplative.”

This morning, and on several mornings recently, I tried to play (Western) classical music while cooking breakfast, just lively solo piano stuff. It was way too much, but because it was a soloist, I was able to pay close attention to what exactly was too much about it (while standing in the kitchen catatonically with my head cocked). It was a compositional and performance problem, and it was definitely a content problem, not a format problem.

This diddly-diddly-dee fancy guy piano music was saying too much. It was like a deliberate attempt to provoke as many mental and emotional states as possible and to swing wildly back and forth along various spectrums of valence. It occurred to me that this was intentional, and that it was conventional, not simply one maniacal composer’s intention or performer’s interpretation.

For the first time, I have started to wonder if I have a values difference — a moral difference — with Western music.

I don’t think this settles the question, but it sure puts points on the board in favor of the interpretation that this whole thing is due to a change in my experience and values over time, not a discovery of innate conditions of which I was unaware. I was definitely into making people feel things in my rock and roll days. Nowadays, not so much. My value on that is more like having the lightest emotional impact possible, treating the human heart like a sacred wilderness where I spent the night.