Luanna wonders: what is music for?

In a world of binaries and black and white, such a question leads only to others: what is music? Who is music for? Is the impossibility of an answer to the question simultaneously the answer? Is it this otherworldly difficult-to-pin-down different-for-everyone sense that is the point of music?   

Here’s the closest I've come to an ‘answer': that music is defined by those who are experiencing it. I was going to say those who listen, but already words are inclined to limit the way we can describe and, consequently, define music. By limiting our description of music to an aural one, we discount the possibilities of music being a live all-senses-wide experience.  A music beyond listening; an idea of music as a temporary state of being in one's mind. 

Music can be a deeply personal, solitary experience but it can also, even at the same time, be a force of connection. The appreciation of music appears to be able to bypass the social and cultural barriers that have historically challenged human interaction, such as language, and encourage connection through the sharing, or communal making, of music.   

Illustration by Luanna McCallum

So the term ‘Music’ is shrouded in ambiguity. With so many forms and ways of being, one of its only constant features seems to be the way music taps into our emotional or spiritual psyche. In other words; that it makes us feel, and how it makes us feel. Even then, our opinions differ so greatly on genre, sound, and style that it feels a little uncomfortable to categorise such experiences into one singular term.   

If music brings people together, how remarkably it seems also to be one of the most controversial topics in the western world. Discussions linked to music can dominate popular culture; as we express opinions not only opinions about various songs new releases, but musicians too. Considering musicians extends our initial question still further: can we separate the artist and the art? Furthermore, if music can be so deeply personal, how can it simultaneously create a sense of community?  

Nick Cave (of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), believes that the answer lies within a sense of shared vulnerability. Of his songs, he writes:  

'I send them out into the world, bright emissaries of the spirit, to travel where they are needed, collecting souls as they go – to the joyful and the disheartened, the sick and the well, the grievers and those yet to grieve, the lost and the found, the good and the bad and the somewhere in-between. They become a great whirling conga-line of souls.'  

 This image, these bright emissaries and conga-lines for me, comes close to clasping the meaning of music, the point of it all.   

One thing is for certain: music is for anyone, in any way, for any reason, for anyone bold enough to grapple with such an elusive thing as the meaning of music.