MUSIC FOR THE THINKING EAR

Kirsten Dawes, Artistic Director

I remember when I first discovered the rush of joy that comes with understanding a complex text. I was a third-language student of German Literature in a class on Critical Theory at the University of Cape Town and the essay was required reading. I was in way over my head, and when I open the book now, I can see my own translations of individual words carefully traced into the margins. I remember how sharpening my pencil to write them made me feel slightly less overwhelmed by this beautiful thing that I was trying to grasp. 

The text was Walter Benjamin’s Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On the Concept of History), and those tiny translations gave me a place to start. Making my way past them and into the rhythms of Benjamin’s beautiful sentences, I was surprised to find myself enthralled by the idea at its heart. The thought that history is not in fact linear and that the truth is closer to a tangled web of experience than a logical series of events, has followed me ever since.

It is almost as hard to talk about music in these terms as it is to describe the wonders of an egg to someone who does not cook. But I think our songs are the key.

In cultures across the world, songs have always been part of how we communicate our experience. They contain our histories. Each might seem simple in its own right, but no one is described by a single song. We collect them as we go—some of them seem to fit together and others do not, but they exist alongside each other and reflect different parts of our existence. We meet other people along the way and take pieces of their songs or pass on parts of our own. What seemed linear becomes convoluted, but in doing so it becomes more truthful.

I have always felt a little sad that we do not get to understand eternity like the all-seeing angel in Walter Benjamin’s essay, but I might have been wrong. Perhaps, if we use our music like I used my pencil, it will help us find the way. I like to think that if we start by following the tracings of individual melodies, they will coax us into their wild tangle of concurrent truths. Taking on the multiplicity of our common experience might feel daunting, but like singing, it is natural, it is beautiful, and it is essentially human.