David Fekete

MYSTICAL MUSIC THEORY, Part 3: Music Is More Than Notes.

“Do you really want to bring him here?” she asked me. She was a prominent and amazing Blues guitar player, formerly played Speed Metal. I’d heard her play a song called, “THAT GUY,” or “THIS GUY”–she hadn’t settled on a title–and I liked the song very much.

We were enjoying each other’s company, over a week-end visit. I think she meant that if she played the song, that guy would be a third wheel in our enjoyment of two.

What could that possibly mean?

One explanation is her mind would go to that guy. Playing “THAT GUY,” she would be thinking about that guy, her mind would be on him, and not me. Not only her mind, music is primarily emotion, not thinking. She would be bringing her feelings about him into the room, into her. She was asking me if I wanted her to have feelings for him in her heart, sitting with me.

It gets deeper. Yes, the composer’s life experience goes into a song. In my poem, SOMETIMES IT COMES DOWN TO SCALES, I write:

“talking about soloing, or composing, or writing a poem

Then you’ll want considerations, the examined life, self-awareness

The struggle to outgrow the script childhood wrote for you–

These are to poiesis as scales are to a musician

I would say a good song or poem sings out of, sings out the human condition

Audiences don’t like a poem or a song they can’t hear

That doesn’t bespeak the human condition, their own condition

(LINES DRAWN AUTHENTIC: A Realized Man, available on Indigo Books online, and NOA Gallery, Bonnie Doon Mall).

My poem also brings in the audience. Music mystically connects the hearts of audiences with only Air. I think that the Air is alive. But science says air is Nitrogen and Oxygen gas.

People are returning to vinyl albums. You take a piece of plastic, and that plastic sends you into tears or ecstasy. A diamond needle sends electrical signals into speakers; speakers make air move in waves, and air waves hit your eardrums and you are joyful. Or cry. Or are transported to God if it is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, 4th movement. Plastic, Nitrogen, and Oxygen.

Part 4 will be about the relationship between performer and audience, as well as the way this figures into the “business of music,” or club management and Artist.

ENIGMATIC DR DAVE ENTERPRISES, PRELUDED

Those pedals and the amplifier back in front of them, makes it all happen!