WHY ITS IMPORTANT TO ATTEND A MUSIC CONCERT TO EVERY LIVING
SOUL.
Music has always had a therapeutic effect on every living
soul that many people haven’t mastered over the years. It’s never enough to
listen to a song or your favourite music or even the music that you do not
understand through a radio. It is unfortunate that Zimbabwe has less than 40 percent
outgoing people who have really connected with the soul of an artist or the
soul of a musical piece.
After years of listening to Lucky Dube on radio, when I
finally had a chance to watch his music video , I put a face to the music and
everything started making sense and boom the connection was there. Same thing happened when I listened to this
youthful outfit called Chalenam Rhythms, my first impressions were that ‘Gospel
Music’ is the same , repetitive choruses that I used to sing when I was young
and there was nothing new on offer but this Percussive jazz approach to music
made me think twice. Technology has really made life even easier to put a face
to music; YouTube, live streaming and Facebook has made people find it easy to
put a face to the music and understand it better. Most Zimbabwean artists are
now concentrating on live DVDs which is generally a way to put face to the good music that people are listening to
everyday.
It is the same reason why music will never be 100percentage
a universal language Chipanga said. Generally you can’t appreciate artists more
when you haven’t had an up-close and personal encounter with them on stage,
when they put action and explanation to their music in a relaxed environment.
I do not want to get into a debate whether or not the
language a song is written to makes a song universal or not. I want to focus
entirely on the music, the NOTES themselves. Think "classical" music,
for example, most of which are entirely wordless. I often listen to a radio
that plays classical music, and they often describe before or after that what
setting the music was written to - like theatre plays, dramas, operas, etc. The
feeling they transmit might be understood by the one's watching the play at the
moment. To me, as the radio listener, however, some tracks don't make sense for
the described settings, at all.
Some tones or melodies might have a certain connotation to
them, like violins can make you grasp the feeling of deep, desperate longing,
as well as tell stories of fidelity, festivities and dancing people, depending
on the way they're played. Music can tell stories - but the story we perceive
is entirely subjective, depending on our upbringing, experiences, memories
associated with certain notes/strings of notes or our current moods. Listening
to a piece of music, ripped out of its original "habitat" - which is
for example, the theatrical play it was written for - can make the listener
imagine an entirely different set of events or invoke different emotions in
different people. Music cannot evoke the same memory or deliver the same story
that the "author" thought of when composing the tune to whoever
listens - in fact, some pieces of music can only be understood or appreciated
by people schooled in the subject, while to other it makes no sense at all.
Music cannot deliver the same message or imperative when
repeated to different people.
"Dance to your hearts delight" is something you
might be able to translate in a piece of music by the way the score is written or the way it is
played.
"Go and fetch me the newspaper", however, might be
easily translated into music, but not everyone you would play the notes for
such an imperative to would understand the message immediately, not even
schooled people.
Even emotional queues might not be caught the same way.
Music CAN invoke emotions in people, connotations to memories they had or fire
up their fantasies. But they will be different in each one of us. Thus i do not
believe it is a universal kind of language.
Chalenam rhythms will put a face to their music on Saturday
9 April at the Zimbabwe German society, where they will be having their ‘season
opener’. Having three albums Prayer
Expose,Grace moments and the latest Goodness, they promised nothing less than a
better understanding of the inspirational music and the language behind it.
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