The resonant song – the artist’s personal ambassador & the listener’s means to discover their own beauty within

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Whether something is music or not is not hard to tell, but the essence of what makes music so powerful is endlessly elusive

First of all, to talk about music is like talking about living beings. As soon as you begin to describe and analyse something about music, there is always something else that is also music but that is wildly different, or something else that contradicts it, proving that what you found essential about why that music works the way it does is far from important in another sample.

With living beings, you might agree on a few universal basics such as the fact that they are alive, that they need nourishment and that they die. You might also find that big groups such as -and all music, in a way, contains nutrients of another kind-. But once you try to find more universal commonalities, you begin to realise that what makes each species what they are doesn’t rely so much on these general qualities but in the unique combinations of characteristics, some which draw from the standard parameters of what living beings do, and some others that seem more accidental, more mysterious.

After all, how many similarities can we find between a flamingo performing their mating dance and a cabbage plant expanding their leaves? In both of these there is an evident will to life, to thrive, but then the task of drawing parallels between them becomes increasingly arduous.

I think that music corresponds quite well with the concept of living being as a category. We do identify a collection of universal properties in all living things that tell us that they are effectively alive and behave as living things do, but then the possibilities become endless just as all the possible variations. Once we move past the fact that something can be identified as music, we find an almost boundless multiplicity of ‘musical things’ which don’t share many essential elements between each other. In other words, what makes one type of musical thing -for example a ’70s funk song- just that, can depend on essential elements that have nothing to do with another musical thing (a Gregorian chant).

And it is not only the formal aspects of rhythm, groove, harmony, singing performance, motif treatment, sections, instrumentation, etc., which correspond to the basic structural aspects that all living beings share such as a way to obtain energy, a way to reproduce or a process of birth followed by the development into adulthood. It is also the context of creation, the intended audience, the intended moment of performance, the language used, or the symbolic conventions and archetypes (the rock n’ roll rebel, the rags to riches rapper, the genius romantic composer, the larger than life pop-star) of the time.

In that specific domain of music where the individuality of the artist/composer takes the spotlight, and where words are involved, that is in songwriting, there are cases where music can perform a particular, wonderful role in the personal development of both the artist and those with whom their music resonates.

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A musical composition is a construct that extends beyond the artist’s bodily presence

The musician-composer (or, for the sake of simplicity I’ll use the more general category of ‘artist’) that has created a corpus of music that resonates with a crowd (or will potentially resonate with one sometime in the future), has accomplished something exceptional.

When she writes a song, the artist has in a way created a durable construct of herself that can take its spot in the world without her needing to be there or even doing anything at all. The song becomes an extension that separates from her bodily being and enables a part of her identity to travel the world as reflected in the musical piece. To put it more simply, once the song is composed, it becomes a thing in the world that people can listen to repeatedly, can reenact by covering it, can talk about and share.

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A musical composition is an ambassador of the artist

And this thing is not only the song itself, it is also an ambassador of the person who created it, because every time that someone sees the name of the song, the listener would associate it (or eventually associate it if they do not know the name of the artist on the spot, since the title in public awareness is indelibly linked to its creator’s name) with a representation they have in their heads of who the artist is. The representation might not be perfectly faithful to the real person, but again, it is an ambassador as well of the artist herself, because the representation, the idea of the artist that a listener has, is ultimately also connected to the artist as a real, physical person. This means of course that what happens to the song and to the idea the people have of who the artist is have, as a whole, consequences on the life of the real person.

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A musical composition is a personal asset of the artist

Aside from being an ambassador of the artist’s identity in the eyes of other people, the song is also a construct in the sense that it makes real and durable some part of the artist such as emotions, a personal story, mental images, fantasies, and so on, to herself. That is, from the point of view of the artist herself, the created song is a kind of intangible, indestructible asset that is profoundly personal. With every finished song that accomplishes real resonance at least with herself, her personal wealth in the sense of these personal intangible assets grows. They are assets because after all, songs have effects in the physical world as much as other objects do; they claim their existence in the world at least indirectly, when they strongly affect the minds of people (and sometimes entire crowds at the same time) who themselves are undeniably effective agents in the world.

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For the artist music is a piece of their inner universality decorated with their individuality

But I think that there is something even more miraculous in an accomplished musical composition than what was described above. Again, it manifests both ways, from the artist’s standpoint and from that of the listener.

By composing the song, the artist succeeded in digging out elements of their own interiority, arrange them in a meaningful way while reinforcing them in cooperation with the laws of music in order to create something that transcends their own person. When the song is finished, it is not a pure reflection of the artist as a whole, it is a magnified emanation of that inner part of themselves that touches upon the universal human experience. The finished piece is still a part of the artist, since it inevitably contains elements that are purely from their individual experience of the world. But it deeply resonates with listeners that didn’t have the same experience on the surface but paired with the musical elements can identify with the universal emotional core.

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For the listener music is a vessel for their own interiority

From the listener’s point of view, this music becomes also a medium with which they can convey their own interiority that can be as reflected on the music’s universality as the personal details that the artist left in the song. The listener can discover their own feelings by listening to it, or they can convey an impression of how they experience the world by sharing the song to other people, passing simultaneously the message that this song is in a way also a representation of themselves (a secondary ambassador of sorts). And if the listener would attempt to perform the song with their own resources, the music becomes a vessel through which they can discover their capacity to express beauty and share it with others when performing it to them. In a sense, it becomes a vessel for the beauty within, like a piece of clothing that once is worn, adapts to one’s own body, with its gait, colour scheme, details, textures, shapes, and prism-like reflects them back out to the world, enhanced but still very much themselves