The Instrument: Language

     Over the past couple of years, I have delved into the realm of music, and I was instantly captivated by its intricacy and potential. If you have been following this blog, then I'm sure that you could tell that I am quite passionate about this topic. I have fallen in love with music for a variety of reasons, ranging from its potential to immediately impact my mood to its ability to make me stop anything I'm doing and dance along. However, music's most attractive component is its capacity for expression, its infinitely limitless instrumentation.

     Although I try not to be a musical elitist, I am saddened every time I think of people who are musically satisfied with the basic musical compositions and styles of music that dominates most of the airways. I am not trying to say that simple music is bad music, because I am very aware that this is not true. In fact, music with the simplest time signatures and rhythms are the easiest to dance and groove to. However, when the someone's capacity to enjoy music is limited strictly to these types of music, they are simply dipping their toes into the bath, they are only tasting one kind of fruit from the market, they have only seen the tip of the iceberg. I can come up with countless metaphors for this unfortunate truth. I only wish that more people could appreciate music's capacity to speak to you in a variety of ways. After all, music is a language.

Music, like any other language, has structure. It has a rich vocabulary consisting of a million words and expressions. Individual notes act like words and the measures like sentences. There is a grammatical structure to music, as a certain group of notes can resonate with each other in a major scale, a minor scale, or a pentatonic key. Through these various grammatical structures, music takes on an emotional depth via connotations. Just as words are associated with their definitions, certain sounds and notes convey certain emotions; major keys are usually associated with joy and happiness, and minor keys with dark, gloomy emotions. By simply listening to the “sentences” of a song, consisting of its key, its poetic rhythm in time signature, and the emotional connotations of the sounds, the audience can feel the emotions that the sounds are trying to convey. 

There is something quite beautiful about music that differentiates it from other languages. After all, it is a language that isn’t limited by words that only a singular nation or culture can understand. It is universally understood and therefore universally important. I’m incredibly proud of my studies in the language of music, and I feel most productive when I play it because, at least to me, music is much more than a form of entertainment. It is an artful science that can express all the colors of the rainbow, all of the emotions of life.

This is all accomplished through instrumentation, and that is why it is the subject of my blog. By highlighting this critical component of music, I hoped to make the expansive world of music more accessible to all. Now, I do not claim to be a master of the musical world. I sill have a lifetime to go to explore music; I find myself playing my bass guitar every single day, practicing my musical expression and expanding my knowledge on the language in order to master it. Nevertheless, all I'm trying to do is open doors because I know that whats behind these doors is a thing of beauty. 

I've said what I've needed to say, now play me out, Hiatus Kaiyote.