On The Inside

The old idiom relating to getting into a piece of music always struck me as an excellent metaphor. It was something I came to expect to happen to me after listening to an album for the fourth or fifth time: abruptly the music would make complete sense to me, as if it simply had to be what it was. Whatever had seemed arbitrary branching gave way to assured paths on an inevitable journey to a given end. And the journey in itself was usually, at least for a time, one of guaranteed pleasure, if not all out joy.

At some point all this changed. I began to get quite a lot of music right away, but not to the point that I felt I needed to get much more. The repetitions were no longer so necessary, but, with time, the inevitable pay-offs I had come to take for granted in the early days became infrequent, at times almost willed. Only rarely could I get lost in a piece. The great exception to this dismal trend came in my mid-twenties with my belated discovery of 'classical' music - especially that of Ralph Vaughan Williams. I found something I could inhabit almost effortlessly.

I was reminded of this playing the CDs of his music for films I purchased recently. For the first time in quite a while I completely surrendered to a piece emotionally in a way that seemed to expand me, make me a bigger person. I'm talking about the wonderful Prelude to the music composed for the film The 49th Parallel. It's one of VW's big, noble, generous, stirring, striving tunes and it somehow finds something big, noble and generous within the listener, despite at least one of those adjectives being so entirely out of fashion.

This is music that can heal.