Today is World Music Day :

Heart Talk

Aditha DISSANAYAKE

Remember the lullabies your mother sang when you were a toddler? Remember listening to Pink Floyd as a teenager – especially to the song Another Brick in the Wall? Later on, it was Brian Adams with his Everything I do or Amaradeva and Adara Hangum, Clarence Wijewardena with Loke Lassana wannata... But on days when nothing seemed to work right it would surely have been Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music singing My Favourite Things. What would life be without this language of the heart?

Unthinkable. Life without music would surely be worse than the Ice Age. To most of us regardless of where we live, what language we speak, music is an important part of our day to day existence. This is so because music comes from within the heart and expresses the way we feel, what we think, and especially, how we love in ways ordinary words can never do.

Moreover, scientists believe singing, listening, and creating music of any kind provide immediate biological and psychological benefits for everyone. These include happiness, less stress, reduced depression, increased competence, hope, and optimism. Losing yourself in the right music is an immediate, unconscious and effortless way to change your negative moods. Thus, when it comes to the healing powers of music, it is both a salvation and an antidote.

Music, undoubtedly is also a means of communication. To quote from Anthony Storr’s book, Music and the Mind - “some writers suggest that music conveys the same meaning to different listeners more accurately than a verbal message.”

Created by a composer, transmitted by an interpreter, heard and recreated by the listeners in many different ways, no one can deny music is a language, more expressive if possible, than language itself. As Aldous Huxley said “Music expresses the inexpressible”.

What then, is preventing music from becoming a universal language? “Everything” says Jayantha Aravinda, former Director of aesthetic subjects of the Ministry of Education and the composer of music for most of Prof. Ediriweera Sarachchandra’s plays, (Rathnavali, Maname, Sinhabahu, Pemathi Jayathi Soko etc) as well as Henry Jayasena’s Thawath Udasank to name only a few. This veteran musician who has studied music in India as well as in Great Britain does not believe it is possible to fuse two different traditions of music. “There are vast differences between the Eastern and Western traditions” says Jayantha Aravinda. “The Eastern tradition is melodic; you listen to one note at a time.

The Western tradition is harmonic; you listen, simultaneously to two or more notes.” He does not believe it is possible to mix the two together to form a genre called World Music. “When you fuse Eastern and Western Music you end up with confusion” is how he explains this phenomenon.

He admits it is undeniable that music all over the world has twelve notes but emphasizes that the “universality” of music from different cultures ends here. “Music cannot be used as a universal language” contends Jayantha Aravinda. “If your ears are not used to the music you are listening to, what you understand of the message the music carries will be insignificant.”

Is this true? I wonder. How many of us have listened to Tere Mere Milan even though we do not understand Hindi, and instinctively responded to the feelings conveyed through the music?

Researcher Thomas Fritz, from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany seems to have the answer. Fritz and his team conducted an experiment with a group of 21 Mafa farmers in Cameroon, Africa who said they had had no previous exposure to Western music. They were exposed to 42 instrumental excerpts of Western music with different tempos, pitch ranges and rhythms. The farmers were then asked whether they thought each piece of music expressed happiness, sadness, or fear and to point to photos of faces showing the relevant expressions. The Mafa’s ability to correctly identify the emotion was far greater than chance, picking the ‘happy’ music 60% of the time on average and ‘sad’ and ‘fearful’ emotions about half the time. It could most likely be that the Mafa were picking up on the same “tone of voice” cues used in human speech, the study concluded.

Thus, as Jayantha Aravinda so rightly states, though music might not be understood equally by each listener, it is undeniable that it does not leave the listener totally unresponsive. Thus, even though we may not have an appreciation of the culture from which it originates, music surely offers us the opportunity to “feel” from deep within our hearts.

While we can never hope to communicate with everyone in the world, perhaps music is the nearest we will ever get to a universal language; because music speaks the language of the heart.

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