Polyphonic Narratives
Music is made up of voices, either instruments or singers, there are many in a piece, and as they are configured together into a track, they create their own story. Multiple musical voices are called a polyphony, and the stories that they tell, as parts in the piece and as a functional whole, result in the summation of a narrative. Here I shall endeavor to articulate these polyphonic narratives as I understand them, across all genres of music.
Music and Story Telling
I have been listening to music since i was maybe 3 or 4. My father is an avid listener, and due to his varied taste, it was something i grew up with. The more i listened to it, the more i always marveled at the varied nature of the stories that it told me. Every song, composition, and track is born of a desire to express a narrative. Each piece is born of the composer's subconscious or conscious desire to express their connect with an emotion, and that emotion's context in the story of their own lives at the time. The piece, simply by virtue of being composed and manifested into a finished piece of music, is inadvertently born with its own inherent sense of narrative. Like a story, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Music exists and operates at various levels, this is my endeavor to articulate the many wisps of the abstract that have arrived like butterflies in my mind while listening to music, and have lingered only fleetingly in my consciousness before they flutter away, leaving me with the mild regret that i had experienced a small insight into perhaps the next layer of the abstraction, and had yet again failed to pen it down somewhere that i could revisit it and muse upon the immense potential that the revelation had to offer.
The Promise It Makes
To me songs are like photographs. They capture a moment, the flavor of its emotion and the reason behind it, immortalizing it into an abstraction that can be revisited through the modicum of technology and experienced again as desired. The photograph is an instant in time, captured forever. It makes you a promise. It never keeps the promise, it only continues to make it, everlastingly, and it is the potential of that promise one day becoming a reality, that the viewer romanticizes. That is what makes you fall in love with a particular image. It is the same with a song or a piece of music. It promises you that it will always relay the captured emotion back to you the same way, every time you hear it. The singers voice will always quiver that particular way on a certain line, the guitar will always sound as clean and sweet, or the piano as melancholic or hopeful.
Your Story and The Music
How you relate to a particular piece is a function of who you are at the time in your life when you hear it. A recent break up or a volatile state will lead you towards music that you can relate to, music that resonates with your current emotional state. Most people listen to music and lyrics that best express their emotional state in their lives at the time. Most chart music is either about love not working out, or about love in its initial phases. Or about the desire for someone, and unrequited love. I see music as a social mirror, it reflects the most universally prevalent situations experienced across most basic human emotions.
