“When Music Takes Root”

Françoise Lombard

A week’s rest in the sun. In the shade of a palm tree I gaze up at the sky through the huge leaves that sway as they are caressed by the breeze. The world of the air meets the world of vegetation, the one moved by the other. The different pressures in the invisible air create magnificent movements with which the tree joins to dance a celestial ballet with its long gracious arms. The superimposed palm leaves with their different lengths, their multiple movements, rotating, sweeping, trembling, the capricious movement of the wind – all of these elaborate yet simply expressed variations have a very restful effect. And if the movement of the wind in the trees were a bit like the movement of sound in our bodies? A sort of interior caress that sweeps us from head to feet? As if by magic, as soon as an acoustic pressure touches the ear and the body, our neuro-psycho-physiological system transforms this vibration into sound. Although the movement of our cells, engendered by the pressure of sound, creates a dance infinitely more complex than that of the wind in the trees, its effect is just as harmonious and satisfying. For it really is a caress, a bio-acoustic one, which is there, like a gift, within reach of our senses and our consciousness.

Even when still, a body that knows how to listen is savoring the music that is singing and dancing inside it.

From sensation to meaning

There was a time when, within the protective warmth of the womb, we let ourselves be rocked by noises and sounds, in a state of total receptivity. After our birth, the sounds we made – gurglings and twitterings – were still felt and manifested in our whole body. Then came verbal language, with its structure, its semantics, and our perception of messages moved to the head, or rather from one cerebral hemisphere to the other. The passage from sound to word is the passage from the sensation of bodily vibration to analysis. This passage, indispensable to understanding and communication, becomes, unfortunately, a one-way street when we forget that words are also music – a music that vibrates in our bodies although we no longer know where or how we are touched by it. Yet, without bio-acoustic vibration, there are no words. Meaning must be carried by sound. Wouldn’t communication not be more alive and real if we were to experience in our bodies the tactile and musical texture of the sounds that underlie words? The voice is a part of the body that detaches itself to fill the space. But it cannot fill the space if it has not already filled the body. “ The voice is the body flying. “(Alain Simon, Acteurs, spectateurs).

This consciousness of the impact of sound comes back to the surface, however, when the emotions are touched. We are sensitive to the way people talk to us and we capture manifold meanings from the intonations and inflections of the voice. We shall come back to this further on. Each of us, in our own fashion, lives in a special relationship with words, according to our sensitivities, our history and our memories.

Our relationship with music: a love story

It is the same with musical language, this language that means so much to us at both the emotional and the spiritual levels. To embody music and express it with all our beings, we must dare to listen to this love relationship that we have woven with it. When did yours start? I remember, I must have been around three years old, lying under the grand piano. My mother played Schuman, Bach, Jaques-Dalcroze, and I was literally bathing in sound under the sounding board of our dear instrument. Then I hauled myself up on the stool and I, too, sang, improvised, learned to read music and to play pieces. My first experiences of listening to the piano were happy and carefree, before I penetrated the labyrinth of a more complex relationship which gradually encompassed an audience, competition, expectations, criticism, the whole arsenal of parameters distancing me from spontaneity and simplicity. It was a necessary passage, of course, this awakening of consciousness and analysis, but my relationship with music became more tortuous, more painful. It is a love that, in some cases, can verge on hate or that can impose so many constraints that it can cause us to reject it. Tumultuous or harmonious, depending on where we are in life, I believe there are as many stories of relationships with music as there are people (including those who consider themselves “ non-musicians “).

Emotional reality

The reason I am talking about this subject is because I observe almost daily in my students the importance of feeling and emotion in their relationship to music. It is not a case of exaggerating this observation or, dare I say it, of getting into therapeutic training. It is more a case of listening and identifying and recognizing their existence and their value. A heart, a soul that expresses itself freely through music, even in a simple song, is touching. It does good as much to the person who is singing as to the person who is listening. But making music or talking about music do not in themselves permit the expression of the emotional dimension, which is often repressed, without our being aware of it, by taboos imposed on us by our upbringing.

The scientific world is opening itself more and more to this subject. «I do not think that the emotions are as intangible and ethereal as many people say they are. In reality, they have a concrete existence that can be linked to specific systems in the body and the brain, just as much as sight and language can (…) Understanding how we see or speak does not belittle what is seen or said, what is painted in a picture or spoken in a theatre. Understanding the mechanisms behind the expression and the perception of emotions is perfectly compatible with the romantic value that they can have for the human being. » (Antonio R. Damasio, neuropsychologist, “Descartes’s error”).

Fear and refusal of emotion cut us off from listening and from our presence in our bodies. Musical intelligence, just like pedagogical intelligence, includes what we call today emotional intelligence “. Time has gone by since the beginning of our link with music. Where is it now? Is it in the head, the ear, outside the body, in the imagination, on the tip of the tongue, at our finger tips? If pedagogues listen to the unfolding of this relationship within themselves, they become conscious of what sets them in motion, what moves them (e-motion), and their teaching can gradually move towards this line of thought and the constructive discoveries of this epoch.

Listening and pedagogy

Listening and sound are marvelous means of accessing the world of emotions. What could be closer to us, more intimate, than the sound of our own voice? As this sound moves around everywhere inside us, listening to it makes us acutely aware of all the interior spaces and of the life they contain. The perception of ourselves that we develop through listening to our body is as important as knowing the inside of our house. To know the periphery and the façade, we can just look in a mirror. But to cross our own threshold, to place our two feet (or, rather, two ears!) inside our house and to explore it, guided by the sound of our own voice, we must dare to do nothing. Just to be there, present, without expectations or prejudices, follow the movement of the sound in the body and let ourselves be surprised by this language of sensations, of impressions, that listening permits us to decipher and understand. When the sounds are reproduced softly and roundly, the ears and the nervous system accept them happily and the whole body becomes a container that feels free and open, liberated from its tensions, its conflicts, its fears, permitting it to aspire to new things. We cannot force the opening of listening, fortunately. Each person has his own rhythm and his own road to travel that respects his nature. We can only listen to ourselves, accompany ourselves, give ourselves as much patience, love, attention and confidence as we give to our friends…

Begin with oneself

As the relationship with ourselves is transformed, so is our relationship with others. That is why, even with a group of pedagogues, we always begin with working on listening to ourselves before coming to the question of teaching. Just a more centered and open presence can change the quality of a course and facilitate learning in our students. At this point in our reflections, listening takes on such dimensions that it becomes almost the equivalent, I believe, of presence and consciousness. As for the ear, it functions even better when encouraged by an attitude of availability and openness in our listening. Emotion can create a screen that prevents a verbal or musical message from being received. Conversely, emotions that are free and open facilitate the reception of the real message. By giving ourselves, as teachers, the time to listen to and name the sensations engendered by the sounds in the body, we encourage our students to experience the same thing, at the same time permitting the body to be better rooted and permitting a better integration of musical knowledge. It will permit the sound to be integrated before the name of the sound, and not the contrary. It will permit the child to have the time to live the beauty of the sound, to hum it, to feel in the instrument which is his body all of the space contained in an interval, before naming each note; to enjoy the music and the movement of the body with all his being, with happiness.

Are you wondering why I bring up so many subjects when I speak about the ear? It is because we human beings function as a whole and express ourselves as a totality. Perceived by both the ear and the body, the experience of sound addresses itself to both hearing and touch. It makes us discover our bodies (our first musical instrument); it touches our emotions and opens our hearts. All of this contributes to the enrichment of our consciousness as well as to our faculty of analysis and expression. It is in this understanding of human functioning that I conceive the training of the so-called musical ear. It is not so complicated really. It is just about daring to let ourselves be touched to the depths of our humanity, so that the life of the music can reverberate in us and so that it expresses itself simply and truthfully in a language felt in the flesh. A bit like the wind in the trees …

(Originally published in the Journal of the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze, Geneva, spring 1997)