The Irrefutable Oneness of Rhythm, Music, and Nature

So here’s my theory! Hahaha XD (Read: Michael Jackson, Death Dance, and a Delightfully Awesome Researcher)

A voice coach once said to me that singing the right notes is 10% voice and 90% ear – and I couldn’t help but agree. Even if you have the most beautiful voice quality in the world, if you can’t listen, identify, and hit the right notes, you wouldn’t have much of a singing career (OKAY, so maybe that’s not 100% true, judging on the singing superstars we have in the industry these days, but yeah, moving on).

Hitting the right notes + appealing voice quality are not the only ingredients into becoming a good singer. You also have to have that Rhythm.

Like many of the beautiful things in the world, such as Audrey Hepburn and a mug of hot coffee, rhythm is subjective. True, every aspiring musician must have it, but rhythm, like beauty, is different for each individual. Yiruma’s rhythm is in a very much different scale than that of Justin Bieber’s. That’s why we have the different genres. AND that’s why there really is no point in comparing one musician against the other. Taste is a person’s own business.

But even though rhythm differs from one musician to the next, each of them can’t call himself a musician unless they have it. I believe that anyone can call himself a musician if he can create music – and that does not include certain people (Read: DJ) “switching buttons and playing other people’s patented sh*t” (thanks, Leo! –check out his music here–). And yet, music, like rhythm, is subjective. Screaming Belting artists’ music might be considered eardrum killers for someone inclined to listen to the sedative form of music.

It’s only right then that the point of music is not to create something which appeals to everyone’s taste, but to create something another soul could identify with and make him feel he belongs to something, to anything…to nature, be it his own or the world’s.

Being a lover of music inSOME of its forms (I admit I can’t tolerate much of Metallica’s raucousness. Sorry, fans), it is inevitable to think and ponder where it all began. Personally, I feel good when I lose myself into the depths of the intangible world, as I am NEARLY doing now, but I’ll try to fight it and finish this…yes…

So where did it all began? Music, like communication and the earliest attempts of it, started with Man. When Man is, Music also is (if that EVEN makes sense!).

I can imagine Man gaining consciousness of what he is, of where he is, and found himself listening to the sound of the leaves brushing against each other, of the wind making melodious gushing with everything it meets, of the tree creatures making their hoots in the night, and the calming effect of a brook’s glide with the rocks in its path.

Oh yes! I can imagine how intoxicated Man must have been with his first taste of music.

It is something that cannot be taught; rather, it’s something that happens. Like feelings and the birth of a star, pollination, and male erection.

So are we right to say that Music started with Man’s communion with the world around him? With Nature?

Partly. Because there’s still another form of music that started a bit earlier – Man’s awakening to the music within. The Inner Nature. The one you hear on a night when you’re all alone, with the world against you in a 1000 to 1 odds, and the future looking darker than any black hole ever discovered.

I totally lost myself there.

Have you ever felt the same way?

*Image courtesy of http://koroitfourfive.wordpress.com/megan/

Michael Jackson, Death Dance, and a Delightfully Awesome Researcher

I read something about what someone somewhere said about Michael Jackson and rhythm. MJ “supposedly” once said that blacks stand out from other singers simply because they have that earth rhythm – that unmistakable beat they possess which is passed on from one black to another, thanks to Genetics and constant jam sessions.

That someone has this theory that since the black people’s forefathers lived/wandered in the desert paradise we now know as Africa, they have expressed their oneness, their gratitude, towards nature (which was all they have ever known before they were forced to slavery back when they were still untouched by the exceptionally ugly white foreigners) through songs and dances in almost every aspect of their lives.

They have songs and dances for hunting, gathering goose eggs, a honey song, cooking song, marriage song, chasing bees dance, Death dance – and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a writing song, although I have my doubts on the necessity of writing back in those days.

Now this way of living, which started from possibly the very first black nomad, was passed on to each of every tribe’s offspring – and so is the rhythm with which they lead their lives. Thus, The Rhythm‘s existence was secured to last for eons.

With this ultra mega useful background knowledge (I know, I know, I’m a great researcher! Pfft..) at hand, I can’t help but form yet another theory of my own farce. I call this “The Oneness of Rhythm, Music, and Nature“.

—to be continued. :p

*Image courtesy of Google search