Enter: Sound / On Reusing Music
When I hear the French verb “sauter,” or to jump, I immediately see jumping vegetables: a flicking wrist throwing up vegetables from a cast iron pan. If someone asks me to imagine the word forget, I think of walking to the outer dorms on a rainy day. And that word itself: forget. I rise with the first syllable, the -o sound lifting through my head like steam. With the second syllable, the sound of that -e, I am dispersed. Fog chases cars to my right as they turn into curves, a cape of small green leaves and helicopter samaras left behind. I turn my head against the car exhaust, and I see a dandelion missing half its seeds, children’s sunglasses resting upside down on the cement.
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When I hear a minor chord, I think of sadness, longing. When I sang “Et in Terra Pax,” or “And on Earth Peace,” in chorus, I heard peace coming down from heaven like rain, saw the same image in the falling notes on the sheet music. When winds blow leaves on trees, I imagine they are butterflies. I imagine the little shifts of their wings sound like wind chimes.
Sometimes, these associations scare me with their immediacy. I have become afraid of attaching feelings to a song because I don’t want to be sent back emotionally to a past time. But slipping into a known song has its comforts. "This Love" by Maroon 5 has always been good at blocking out what I don’t want to hear, my parents twisting each other’s insecurities, sometimes even the sound of winter cold as I walk back alone to my dorm.
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The practice room is a skinny grey rectangle, and the piano is plain brown. The only color comes from a drawing of a bird bird on the wall and a large window open to a leafless tree. But that’s all I need. This empty space gives room for explosions, for expansion. When music speaks to me, I hear Emily Dickinson whisper: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” In music, there is always a moment that makes me think and rethink, a time when veils are shifting, if not necessarily lifted. It doesn’t quite make sense, but I know I am reaching for the truth.
This moment happens the same way only once, and I have this habit of playing a song on repeat. People tell me doing this is crazy, that it ruins the magic of a song, that I wear songs out. Flying from Boston to San Francisco to go home for winter break, I played Frank Ocean’s "Pink Matter" on repeat for the whole seven-hour flight. It’s what I needed at the time, and I don’t treat music as a thing to use up like pie or pens or paper. I want a song to be eternal, and for me, replaying a song deepens its impact as more associations join the first. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to be stuffed, to be swelled with meaning. Not the first time playing a song, but in later times, we slip into it as if it is a dark wave going over our heads. We lift with it, and in its inevitable collapse, we reach fulfilment.