What is it about music?

I've thought a lot about what I want this blog post to be about. And given that this blog is for the UIC radio station, what better thing to write about than music?

One thing about music that is pretty intuitive, and maybe common knowledge yet still very interesting to me is that its a mode of emotional expression. Music is so emotionally compelling, but I don't really know why. I want this blog to be a look into why exactly musicians and songwriters feel compelled to do what they do. Because everyone loves music. There is something very innate and human that causes us to enjoy rhythm and harmonies. And there are many people that have learned instruments to play their favorite songs. Yet there are not many people who have committed themselves to composing new music unique to them. With the advent of the internet and increased access to composing tools, the number of people that have tried their hands at composition has increased, but relative to the number of people that care about music yet have never composed it there are very few.

I've been playing music for so long that it feels like a natural way of expression, but one day, something happened that made me sit down and make something new and purely my own. It probably has to do with the nature of art and self expression, but I don't have time to think about the souls of artists right now. In reading "A portrait of the Artist as a Young man," "To the Lighthouse," or "An American Childhood," I've been confronted with many cross-sections of the artist, but the human desire to create is something so deep and primal that I don't think I will ever understand it, partly because I cannot imagine my life without an artistic outlet.

So with selfish motivations I asked my friends who compose music about their perspectives, and they kindly obliged me: here are the results.

Q1: What about playing music felt good to you when you first started?

A- I played violin because I was told to try by my parents. The first lesson had me feeling excited because I was making something. Then I started loving listening to music I felt like I could be Kurt Cobain and Jack White. They made great stuff and I wanted to also. Now I play to create something meaningful to give myself meaning.

B- I started playing on this little toy cat piano I found in the back of my closet when I was 8. I wasn't musical at all, or even aware of it that much. My family is Muslim, so the permissibility of listening to music is debated and what I did hear was religious music, which were honestly just audio sermons. I had no intention of getting into music or becoming a musician. It was just a puzzle, and figuring out how to play a song on it was the solution. I spent a whole week trying to figure out the beginning of "Fur Elise." I didn't really have any friends or hobbies or video games so I just screwed around on my keyboard. I didn't really care, I loved it. I kept picking harder and harder songs to learn and eventually I just, knew how to play it? Eventually it just became "the thing I did." I joined band in 6th grade on trumpet, and the first thing I did when I got my trumpet was open up the handbook to the fingering chart and try and teach myself songs, and I ended up leaving because it just didn't feel fulfilling at all, I guess.

It started as just doing it as a puzzle, but as it started to become a greater and greater part of my identity, in a weird sort of way my growth as a musician became the same as my growth as a person, and I think it still is to an extent. I also conveniently lobotomized myself socially by not talking to anyone for 4 years, so playing things replaced that, me being able to play something better or faster or harder was like being able to talk better.

C- I picked up drumming out of sheer curiosity when I was in grade school; it started with just playing along to my favorite tunes, then I decided that I wanted to make music as a means of self expression, which brought me to pick up bass and guitar on the side.

D- I started doing violin. I hated learning to read music, so I switched to upright bass in 6th grade after 7 years. I played that for 7 years and at the same time in 6th grade my dad’s friend gave me an electric bass. I fell in love, and played a lot of XTC songs on it. Eventually, I found out you can write music and fell in love with that too. And then I liked to sing because it’s even more expressive.

E- At first it felt nice to be able to make something so cohesive. There’s a certain power to making music, and initially it was covers of songs I liked the sound of. It was comforting and satisfying to be able to create those sounds.

F- I was shoehorned into playing piano when I was 9 or 10 by my dad who had always wanted me to embrace music. For the longest time I always perceived music as being my dad's game, something that he was so good at that there was no point in trying to find my own path. Looking back on it, I think I was just scared to take the first step and didn't have any intrinsic motivation to do so. When I was 16, I told my dad I wanted to play accordion after seeing an accordionist on the street in London and getting this wild vision of pursuing a career as a beautiful street bum, peddling for change on corners. Strange and persistent visions have been a consistent part of my experience with music, much of my motivation to play guitar comes from this warped image I have of the beauty of the caricatured depressed, poor artist writing his fucking heart out before he smokes and drinks himself to death. Part of it is that being an artist is the only way that living a life like that is acceptable, not that I necessarily want to embrace that path. When I graduated from high school, my dad gifted me a red Gibson melody maker that he had seen on the day he first saw his mother in a comatose state. When he gave it to me I felt this immense fear that it would be a wasted gift and that I could never commit long-term to playing guitar. That initial fear of shame pushed me to play, but as soon as I started I remember such an intense mixture of joy and pain as I struggled to learn. I wrote my first lyrics to a simple C to G chord progression maybe two weeks in and felt real satisfaction. Writing music quickly became the driving factor behind my playing, along with the desire to play good music with friends.

Q2: What about playing music feels good now?

A- I write lyrics for the same reason I write music: to create something beautiful and therefore meaningful.

B- I'm weirdly starting to enjoy the physical fidgeting side of it more and more. It also feels good to be able to sing and hit notes, took me a year but got there. I use lyrics but only if they come to me very fast. It's basically impossible for me to write lyrics, what I suspect happens is the ghost of some musician's song abortion, roaming the earth restlessly, possesses me and writes itself out, and that's how it happens. All my lyrics are on the accessibility level of "divine fucking intervention".

C-Music is both just a primitive source of enjoyment for me, as well as an outlet for self expression. The former comes from instrumental playing, and the latter from writing lyrics. It’s about constructing something that sounds sick and/or beautiful, and then group synergy on top of it.

D-It feels good to play music that means a lot to me. So all my songs are like little treasures. The rhythm of it also feels nice, to have your body and mind beat in time with something along with other people. Singing is great too cause it forces me to use my chest and voice. For a long time I was afraid to speak, and afraid to hear myself. Singing forces me to face myself.

E-I don’t really make music to put out into the world, but I write a lot and I wanted to be able to express certain feelings that I couldn’t put into words. The experience of heartbreak and grief, of love, of confusion, all of it is something that feels so enhanced by listening to music and associating different sounds with those feelings. Recently I’ve been turning old poems into songs as a way to enhance the meaning without making the writing needlessly complicated.

F- Struggling to write and play good music feels incredibly bad. Thrashing around with a bad melody or boring lyrics isn't fun. Hitting a thousand wrong f*cking notes up and down the fretboard makes me suicidal sometimes. Recording the same bad takes over and over again makes me feel like I should be putting my foot through my skull. But my first thought to these frustrations is never that I want to quit playing guitar and writing lyrics, I just feel a deeper longing to make good music. I think its the longing that makes playing music feel good, because every time I do make something I'm proud of I can feel myself become satiated for a bit. Of course, its never long enough so I'm usually back to chasing the high pretty quickly.

Q3: Do you feel like when you play music it is a way to convey thoughts that cannot be conveyed otherwise?

A- Not thought, I’m good at conveying thoughts, but not emotions. I can covey an emotion through music much stronger than through words, and music coveys strong emotions to me.

B- At the end of the day all of our methods of conveying thoughts are just representative, they have nothing to do with the actual emotion, they're just labels that point towards those emotions. The problem with writing for me is that the labels already exist, so you have to find the pieces before you can use them. Music is so unstable and shifting and personal that you can say whatever you want as if it doesn't have a language at all. You can change it as much as you want. Text and words have widely recognized meanings, music is much more vague, which is powerful. On the physical side, getting slices of string and wound metal to be harmonious takes so much physical attention and control that your emotions or thoughts inevitably end up influencing the sound of it.

C-Not necessarily; rather, I find music provides a more powerful language to speak certain thoughts and emotions. You could pen a poem on your own, but creative writing has so much more power when paired with music.

D- Yes, a lot of times I can’t explain or understand myself. So I write little lyrics that feel evocative. I like that they can be contradictory and illogical or even childish. Then I can add music that gives it the right feeling. And then by piecing together the song I sorta figure out my feelings and figure out a way to share them.

E- Absolutely. I was in a band (Gorilla & the Bricks) and I played drums. It was honestly incredibly cathartic to physically get out all my energy and to have that contribute to a performance or a song. It’s like I said before, sounds convey feeling in a way that words aren’t always able to, but they also work with those words to make it more powerful.

F- Maybe. A lot of the beauty in making and listening to music comes from the lyrics of a song, and since I believe that most lyrics are of a poetic nature maybe you don't need the musical aspect for those thoughts to be conveyed. I think what music can express for me better than any other medium is raw emotion or feeling, rather than thought.

Q4: Do you feel like the music you write helps you process difficult feelings/emotions?

A- Yes. Music also makes me feel like bad experiences are worthwhile because I can make music about them

B- I think music is like a language. The problem with language is that you have to not only learn how to speak but you have to learn how your speech will be heard, the things you say are as much a reflection of your own ideas as they are the people you're speaking to, whether that's your friends or your boss. There's a structure to it no matter what you do and you operate within them. Music has no wrong choices. If you slam the keys of your keyboard and submit it as a story to your local magazine they'll take you to the back alley and blow your head off. But, if you screech out dissonance for 15 minutes, sure, plenty of people will hate it, but if you ask them what emotion it conveys I guarantee you they'll guess pretty close. Music can truly have soul I think. Where literary works always seem to be records of spoken word, music feels like it can exist on its own, independent of a writer, and hold emotions, store them, and release them back to you. Where I've been unable to express how I feel, I've put those emotions into songs, specific songs written in the moment that suck up that point in time and freeze it, I can travel instantly to that time and those thoughts and those ways of thinking that I had when writing it just by listening back. Maybe I'm biased, but no scrawls in my notes app ever did that.

C- Not really to process, but to gather them all up — especially over a period of time.

D- Yup. Songs are ways to make a good thing out of something sh*tty. If I feel absolutely terrible, I can write something about it, and it helps me move past it and I can be happy because I made a new song.

E- Yes. My breakup is ravaging my well-being and I have written 7 songs exclusively about it because I’m dramatic.

F- Absolutely. Time is running out.

Q5: If you have been writing music for a long time, do you think that your music has changed similarly to how you have personally changed? Why or why not?

A- It has changed. I used to write things with a super clear message, and tried to sound like the people I loved and was attached to the old. Now I write a bit more poetically and really want to make something fresh.

B- I think maybe it's kinda reflective. A lot of my early music is just kinda weird and naive sounding, because I was weird and naive and didn't know anything about pop culture and so my music was a strange kinda imitation game of not just the songs I heard but of that entire culture surrounding music. Then my music got a lot more produced, around the time I started getting more social contact and started checking my image more and almost constructing my personality. And, now it's laid back more, I'm more willing to let things be imperfect, or even unpolished, as long as they're authentic captures of what I'm doing, which is how I've started to treat myself more.

C- I used to write just to construe cool ideas and make something of them. Now, as a result of my own personal life experiences, I find myself inflecting my experiences onto these more grandiose concepts. Maybe as a means of hyperbole, maybe as an outlet. I still don’t know the answer.

D- I haven’t for super long but definitely. I used to be more loose and unfocused and confused, and I think my music reflected that. Now I have a bit more structure to my life and I think my music reflects that growth.

E- I haven’t been writing music for long but I have been writing and I can say with confidence that as my interests have grown and changed, the way I interact with creativity has to. Part of it is the fact that I’m interested in music at all: when I got into writing I was big into fantasy and world-building. Now, despite my appreciation for those aspects of creativity, I find myself more inclined to engage with media I previously was relatively uninterested in.

F- I mature, I realize that I don't like reading my old work, I never go back except for the memories.

Originally, I was going to paraphrase or cut apart these responses and synthesize everything that has been said into some grand theory on artistic expression. There are similarities and points of agreement in which I could make an argument for homogeneity in musical creation, but I wont. Because I believe reading through these responses shows how music is so personal and the experiences with it are so complex, that it is impossible to point at one thing and say "that's why."

*Cover photo from Pinterest