English: Soul Basement (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Ross Enahnte’
As a former musician (classically trained) I do try to keep an ear out for anything new that might be worth listening to. There’s not much out there. So after much consideration it’s my belief that we of the 21st century have come to settle into a groove on the State of Music. It seems that technological advances have surpassed imagination and commerce has darkened the soul. Have you listened to the radio lately? We are drowning in a sea of sound that is essentially homogenous in nature. The “commercial artist” continually panders to an unsuspecting public in an unceasing worship of the almighty dollar. Where is the Soul? Where is the Spirit?!
The true artist seeks to confine music to its true function of serving Soul and Spirit by expressing feelings and situations without cooling the heated passions within us by avoiding the use of superfluous sounds and tricks. We should hold to the belief that music should join to the Soul what the vividness of colors and well used lights and shadows bring to a correct and well conceived design, animating the feelings without altering them.
Music, in its purest sense, is not for commercial gain but for passification of the Soul and Spirit! Music is to embody feeling without force. It should be as natural as a spring rain or a birdsong. Music presents the intensity and expression of feeling: it is the intelligible essence of feeling capable of being perceived by the senses. It permeates us like a ray of sun, like morning dew, and like our own Spirit, fills our Soul.
And so I say to the mere mortals of commercial “prostitution” “Veil your faces!” Your conventional language of the masses cannot compete with the ART of sound. You are glorious in materialism but defeated in integrity by the artist that remains true to himself. You do not know what we call melody, harmony, the waves of sound that at first conflict then embrace. You do not know our strange accents that make the most unexplored depths of the Soul reverberate.
I despair of trying to give an impression of this idealism. You have to hear the music for yourself to conceive the degree of truth and sublimity that musical painting can create at the hands of a true artist. Today’s music is no longer rain and wind. It is an appalling cataclysm, a great flood, maybe the end of the world!
If only I could wave my magic wand…
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