Reflections on how we respond to music and what it can give
“I first heard ‘The House of the Rising Sun‘ as a child, one night in bed, when I was supposed to be going to sleep. I’d recently been given a big old radio, the size of a toaster, and I was turning its Bakelite knob when this sound came out of the static. I didn’t know then that the musicians called themselves The Animals, but the name was well chosen. I don’t like to speak of ‘impact’ where art is concerned, because it gives a falsely one-sided idea of what happens in artistic experience, but hearing that sound really was like being struck. The guitar’s electric opening notes, the singer’s lived-in voice, the acidic, swirling organ, the complicated storytelling (a woman’s tragedy re-cast as a man’s) and the arrangement that builds through layers of pain and despair—I had literally never heard anything like it.”
from ‘Music. What is it good for?’
Music: What is it Good For? v.3 (02/22) is the revised text of a talk originally given on 29 April 2014 at the Sound Sense music event, ‘Everyone Deserves Music’, at Sage Gateshead. It was published in February 2022 at https://miaaw.net.
François Matarasso 