Soundtrack of the Self

Our lives are told and written and bound in art.

I wake up every morning with music in my head. While I was teaching, it was, "I'm a Little Teapot," and, "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider," just as often as it was, "Five Years," by David Bowie. Now that I'm out of the preschool world, my musical repertoire has expanded again, and I spend those first few moments - waiting for the coffee to brew - haunted by melody, chord progression, the odd lyric or two. Music never leaves my head. Sometimes I need to turn on the radio just to get some peace.

It can be loud and irritating, or it can be soft and seductive, my heartbeat counting out the measures of notes half-recalled. Music is in me every day, and it would be easy to say that that quality comes from my family - musicians all - but I think it comes from somewhere else.

We all interact with music.

Recently, on Facebook, I posed a question regarding how my friends might listen to music. Did they listen to a whole album as one piece of art, or as individual songs, or some combination of both? I was wondering how the state of music today - digital, downloadable, streamed according to curated playlists - might affect the way we perceive music. Growing up, I listened to albums and memorized them all, the order of the songs, the way a story was told. Now, totally addicted to Spotify, I've created playlists for every mood, David Bowie lined up next to Stevie Wonder and Peter Gabriel and Fiona Apple and Frank Sinatra.

My playlists are a part of my identity. They tell the story of me.

Most of the respondents to my question said that they listened to both albums and individual songs. I'd wager that if my friend group skewed younger, most of the responses would be option B - we don't even buy CDs anymore, let alone LPs, so I think we've grown accustomed to grabbing songs one by one. Liner notes are gone; those hours I spent scanning tiny printed lyrics are obsolete.

So the way we interact with music may be changing - or it may reflect the way we've always been. We might have always chosen to experience whole albums as long stories as well as buzzing with the thrill of that one song which really seemed to get who we are inside. What is undoubtedly unchanged is that music is a constant.

I'm a big fan of the idea that music is accessible to all of us. It's available to all of us. We experience music in mundane moments - commercials, the grocery store, the doctor's office - and we experience it in profound ways, even if we don't notice it. Movies and television shows couldn't exist without music, even if we only perceive that subconsciously. The story-telling world of visual media is endlessly enriched by scores and soundtracks. Hans Zimmer is just as much an artist as Beethoven. Peter Gabriel's cover of David Bowie's, "Heroes," defines the urgent and chilling mood of Netflix's, "Stranger Things."

But so often - too, too often - music is seen as the purview of only a few. Of only the "talented." The same goes for theatre, for visual art, for dance. We've made a society which limits us because not every child can perform, innately. And it's patently ridiculous.

Music is emotion, music is a lodestone. It doesn't matter if you can name chords or identify instruments in a symphony - it doesn't matter if you had piano lessons or played in your elementary school band - music is where our souls rest. Where we rejoice - where we are truly alive. Maybe the only way you hear music is in jingles or pop songs played low on the radio - it doesn't matter. Music is a part of us.

I'm lucky because I grew up with so much music around me. Choral music at church, and pop with my mom in the car; jazz on long golden afternoons, rock and roll with my dad. I had Ravel coming out of my fingers and I had Johnny Cash cocooning me in the wet heat of Baltimore summers. It was never something I questioned; it was a given. So yeah, I have that innate thing, the genetic predisposition, but mostly I was raised in music. I was nurtured. But so many kids aren't. So many kids aren't allowed to participate in music because they can't quite carry a tune.

It drives me absolutely bonkers. It's the same with Shakespeare, for me - an art form that is so easily accessed when it is taught early. Art is how we are human beings, and we are all human beings; we share in emotion, and art gives us the language to express that. It's plain old snotty to say that some people deserve that and some people don't.

I don't expect that everyone in the whole world will choose to be a musician as their profession. But I do think that we are all musicians in our own ways. I got a lot of responses to my Facebook question - and none of them were, I hate music. None of those responses indicated that music wasn't something which had value. Whether we listen to a whole album or a handful of songs - whether we see our identities reflected in our playlists or just enjoy dancing around the kitchen - we are all a part of music, and music is a part of us. It belongs to all of us.

Snobbery has no place, there. Exclusion is useless and cruel. Shoddy education is injustice. We don't have to like everything, or be good at everything, or be comfortable singing anywhere other than the shower. But no child, no adult, should feel like they can't make music their own form of speech. Of self-knowledge. A soundtrack of our selves, living. 

We should argue passionately with each other with the percussion of symphonic metal, and we should flirt with the wailing of Janis Joplin; we should mourn with requiems, we should confess our deepest truths with Jacques Brel. Whatever our music of choice - whatever's got us buzzing - we should remember that we all speak this language. We should silence no one. We should welcome all.

I wake up with music in my head, and it annoys me to no end. Music won't leave me alone. But I turn on a playlist, or an album, or the radio, and I cram new music in there, and I breathe into it. I make the coffee, I write the words, I take a bath, I put on makeup, and the music keeps going. Here, I think - here is how we are commonly human.

Here is the story of our lives.