If there’s anything that makes us wax sentimental it’s music. Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night “If music be the food of love, play on….” And who was it that said “music soothes the soul”? These people truly knew what they were talking about.
There is some music that we find annoying and we’re sure that there is some music that we like that would grate on other people. We don’t all have the same taste, obviously and thank goodness for that. How boring the world would be if we all loved James Brown and hated Spragga Benz? But wait! If we all loved James Brown there would be no Spragga Benz. Hmm that’s a thought.
This month, we have been on an eclectic musical journey, listening to Richard Clayderman, Beyonce, Amerie; we took in the Guyana Music Teachers Association’s Musicians on Stage concert on June 7; followed that up with a range of smooth 70s and 80s soul and right now we’re listening to the unique piano and vocals of Ms Alicia Keys. Not bad, not bad at all.
In fact it has all been nostalgic. Isn’t it strange and wonderful how music can take you back to memorable times in your life? How you can hear a song and remember your first dance; your first date; your first love? And what about those songs that you absolutely must sing along with? Or the ones that you hear someone else singing and then they get stuck in your head and you find yourself singing or humming them for the rest of the day or week? We have been having such a month.
Then by happenstance, while we were being a bit of a domestic superhero last week and burning the midnight oil over the ironing board with HBO for company, we caught the last half of the film August Rush. As it turns out, this is a superb film starring Freddie Highmore as August Rush, Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers and with Terrence Howard and Robin Williams playing brilliant supporting roles. And if you didn’t know, it is about music – not a musical but close enough. August Rush is the name an 11-year-old child prodigy takes to avoid being institutionalized again by the authorities so he could continue to play his music, which he believes will help his parents find him and by the end of the film they do. They also find each other again as they had been separated before he was born.
In the film, the young protagonist hears music in the wind in the trees; the swish of tyres on asphalt; squeaking wheels on a shopping cart, the bouncing of a basketball being dribbled; the clang of the chains as a player slam dunks. He writes an entire rhapsody for a full orchestra, conducts the New York Philharmonic playing it in Central Park and finds his parents who are both musicians, or rather, they find him. But then that is the power of music.
We have never met anyone who dislikes music, but we are assuming that there may be a smattering of such soulless persons around somewhere, living drab lives. We pity them. Meantime, we return to Alicia Keys, the rhythmic staccato of our shoes on floors and pavements; the patter of rain drops. We too have learned to hear music in all of this and it’s a truly an amazing thing. (thescene@stabroeknews.com)
