An individual is a notice within the mouth of likelihood hungry for tune, reverberating with echoes of the not possible. To exist in any respect is as shut as this universe of austere legal guidelines and inert matter will get to a miracle. At its most miraculous, life has a musical high quality, harmonious and symphonic with that means. The phrase particular person itself takes its root from the Latin for “to sound by way of.”
And but this musicality is greater than a metaphor — it’s a part of our materials nature, our creaturely inheritance. “Matter delights in music, and have become Bach,” wrote the poet Ronald Johnson. Music thrusts our neurobiology into transcendence. The poetic physicist Alan Lightman noticed it as a language for the exhilaration of being alive. However it is usually the language of mortality. “The usage of music is to remind us how quick a time we have now a physique,” Richard Powers wrote.
Poet, French horn participant, and choral singer Hannah Fries (who can also be the visionary editor behind the Universe in Verse guide) celebrates this enlivening relationship between music, that means, and mortality in her gorgeous poem “Let the Final Factor Be Tune,” learn right here by Hannah herself to the sound of her younger son improvising on the piano:
LET THE LAST THING BE SONG
by Hannah Friesi.
Reminiscence is most secure in somebody with amnesia.
Behind locked doorways
glow the unmarred items—
musical notes buzzing
in a jumble, solely
ready to be
organized.ii.
What’s left in a single
who doesn’t bear in mind?
Love and music.Not a reputation however the fullness.
Not the sequence of occasions
however order of rhythm and pitch,a bit of time during which to exist.
iii.
A tone touring by way of area has no referent,
and but we infer, and but it
finds its means between our cells
and shakes us.Aren’t all of us nonetheless quivering
like tuning forks
with the shock of being,
the shock of being seen?iv.
After I die, I need to be sung throughout the brink.
Don’t you? Doesn’t the universe,
with its loosening warp
and weft, nonetheless
unspool its symphony?Sing to me — please —
and I’ll sing for you as all unravels,
as time continues previous the ultimate beat
of the stutter inside your chest.Harmonize, on the fringe of that horizon,
with the black gap’s
fathomless B-flat.
Couple with Marie Howe’s breathtaking “Hymn,” then revisit Nick Cave on music and transcendence within the age of AI and his studying of “However We Had Music.”
