BY ASHER REISNER
Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, I hear unfamiliar music. Because the remains of a dream is a fugitive memory, what I heard is perhaps lost forever. But I remember the experience: sound without source, without agent. Immanent, immersive, yet surreal; lacking the immediacy and definition of waking life.
In the dreamworld, laws of the conscious state are held in abeyance. The body is paralysed. The senses are turned inward. Critical judgment is suspended. Yet for all this, I believe the unconscious landscape is not a counterfeit reality, nor is the music discovered there illegitimate. It is an echo of memories, a memory of echoes, a coalescence of impressions from life transformed by the imagination. And therefore, its scope is limited, constrained by the exhaustible reservoir of experience and the finite human genius.
If indeed the bounds of conception are described by those of perception, then it is only through the recognition, and ultimately the transgression of these limits, that as-yet-undreamt-of music may be contemplated and realised. In the pursuit of such a goal, the artist must reprise the role of the artificer. They must concern themself with the discovery and invention of musical media and technology, with their breaking and remaking, and not only with their study and use.
But the mind and the senses are yoked together, the doors of perception guarded. Consequently, the idea of music becomes its reality; it recognises only itself. Perhaps therefore a state of mind could be achieved whereby the music in the noise of traffic, in the sight of a frozen waterfall, in the appreciation of humanity’s remoteness in the universe, is all comprehended.
Our station in life is such that this state is all too often out of reach. It must be induced by works of art or episodes of hypnagogia. This leads to the conflation of music’s cause with music itself. But when the totality of life is experienced in this mode of being, music then reveals its true nature as something not heard, but lived.
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Featured image by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash.
