A Touch of Music

By Volodymyr Kish

I recently spent an enchanting evening listening to one of Toronto’s finest choirs, the Bell’Arte Singers, perform. For at least those few hours, I could forget the stresses and travails of the day, the proverbial “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”, put my mind in neutral, and let it ride the waves of the extraordinary music that suffused and echoed off the well-timbered and acoustically generous confines of an historic old church.

Fine choral music is like manna from heaven. It represents Mankind’s ultimate artistic achievement. Evolution brought us the gift of language, and words became our means of expressing thoughts and ideas. Similarly, music became the language of feelings and emotions. When you combine the two, you get song, and when you harness the efforts of a large group of talented voices in perfect harmony, you get choral music, a magical blend of thought and feeling that lifts communication from the confines of the intellectual to the dimension of the spiritual. Add the creative genius of a good composer and the artistic mastery of an exceptional conductor, and you get pure bliss.

Since the earliest days of human consciousness, music has played an important part in our lives. It is likely that even before we developed language, we had music. Whether it was the rhythmic beating of primitive drums, the lilt of simple flutes made of wood or bone, or the soulful vibrations of the earliest string instruments, we have been captivated by the enchanting mix of rhythm, pitch and timbre that soothes our souls and stirs our passions. The earliest archeological evidence of Homo sapiens existence also includes ancient flutes made of bone that are at least forty thousand years old.

Of course, even before there were musical instruments, our earliest ancestors discovered they could make interesting and pleasant sounds using nothing more than their natural voices. As human self-awareness grew and we developed rites, rituals and religion, music and song became an integral part of those endeavours and one of the primary expressions of our creativity.

The Ancient Greeks were the first to really develop music and song as art forms and built large open air theatres dedicated to their performance before large audiences. In European culture, the development of musical notation during the Middle Ages led to a rapid and revolutionary development of musical expression into its multiple forms both instrumental and vocal. Individual instruments were harmoniously combined into ever larger orchestral formations. Monophonic religious chants evolved into polyphonic arrangements for large choirs. Lastly, we saw the incredible explosion in the different genres of music from the original religious and folk forms into the vast variety of musical expression that we have today.

With our modern penchant for trying to understand the scientific foundations of everything, we have also seen a lot of work go into trying to understand exactly what music is and particularly its effect on human moods and behaviour. There is considerable effort being dedicated to the fields of musicology, cognitive musicology, music psychology, the neuroscience of music, psychoacoustics and musical aesthetics. Musical theorists are digging deeply into the various components of music, both the structural, i.e. “rhythm, harmony, melody, structure, form, and texture” to the aesthetic - “lyricism, harmony, hypnotism, emotiveness, temporal dynamics, resonance, playfulness, and color”, to quote one article on the current state of musical research. Not being particularly musically literate, I have but a superficial understanding of all these things. I do, however, love music, and that in no way diminishes my appreciation of this remarkable art form.

The importance and magic of music was best demonstrated to me in a very personal and poignant way when my mother was progressively going through the various stages of Alzheimer’s Disease before she eventually passed away some years ago. From an early age, she had always enjoyed singing, and in her later years, her greatest joy was singing in the UNF choir in St. Catharines where she lived though she could barely read or understand musical notation. In the later stages of that terrible disease, when she could no longer even communicate verbally, and when most of her memories had virtually evaporated away, the one thing she continued to respond to was music. We had made her a small collection of tapes of Ukrainian folk and choral music, and she would play them over and over until they eventually wore out, and we had to make her new copies. Somehow, that music and those songs reached her on a psychological and spiritual level long after all other modes of communication had failed, a phenomenon that is beyond our current comprehension.

Perhaps music, like religion, is not meant to be understood on an intellectual level, but shall forever remain in the realm of the spiritual. Be that as it may, I shall continue to indulge in my own personal musical hedonism. My only regret is that I never really learned how to sing properly myself.