"It Sometimes Looked a Little Like This"

“The reason we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.”
—Jewel the Unicorn in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle

What is music? I don’t believe in magic except two kinds: the supernatural power held by the angels and demons, and the unusual and yet extremely human power of music. “Heavenly magic” I can slightly wrap my mind around on good days. But music is different. We don’t really understand it, because, even though we seem to have invented it, and probably did, we’re still completely unable to reach out and point to what its essence is. We don’t know what we’ve “created”—only what it does to us.

What does music do to you? Some music makes you want to cover your ears and run away, admittedly. It varies from person to person. But for everyone there’s at least one kind of music, or one song, that wakes something up inside, or touches them from afar, or fills them with a warm fuzzy feeling. Sometimes it’s just an overwhelming surge of the positive—these songs are usually hard rock for me. But sometimes it’s horribly beautiful and has just enough grief in it to make you almost want to stop listening to it…except you can’t, because you want to listen to it over and over again. I believe this is the sort of experience that C. S. Lewis described as “joy”.

But why on earth does music do this to us? Such a question has troubled me for quite some time. It’s a bit unsettling—it’s hard even to define music, because “sounds of a particular pitch combined in rhythms with layers of harmony” just doesn’t cut it. It’s as though we don’t even know what we’re dealing with, like we’ve discovered a mysterious clear-colored liquid in a beaker and, even though we really like how it makes us feel when we drink it, there’s that haunting little question of um, what is this stuff, anyway? Is it frightening to be so susceptible to the power of an unknown? We’re drawn back to it repeatedly because we’re pretty sure that it’s good, but there is a definite underlying vibe of otherworldly to music.

Yet this vibe is mixed with a strong sense of human creation: we make the music, we listen to it, we’re continually revising and crafting and improving it even to this day (some of us are making it worse, and, amazingly, some others of us are still inexplicably cheering them on). How can something, in one sense, feel like we know it inside and out, and yet, in another, feel completely foreign to our comprehension? The unknown part, whatever it is, must have come first. The “known” part—the part that we feel we have created, because we invented music—cannot have, because humans really can’t create things, we can only copy them. It’s a sort of mini-creating, like a child who draws a car that can fly because he’s seen cars and he’s seen planes.

So this unknown essence, this magic that (almost) all music has, exists at all, it can only have been the original. If you think about it, you know that all our human, technical, man-made musicality—the music theory, the notes, the composing, even the feeling of knowing that another human put together in his or her mind the harmonies and beat and rhythm and melodies and chords of any particular song—all of it, despite its grandeur, does feel like trappings around the edges, or like trimmings covering the core of the actual music. We must have put these on ourselves onto the original thing.

What do we call it when humans reach toward an unknown essence and try to pull some out it down to ourselves and tack an idea of our own onto it in order that we might be able to relate to it? Symbol. A letter is a symbol that collects a tiny amount of linguistic meaning and puts it in an outfit through which we can recognize it. A red rose, in our culture, is a symbol that, absurdly, attempts to sum up the depth and breadth of one of the deepest and most incomprehensible human emotions in a way such as that it can be presented to another human being. (Not that this always works, but no human symbol is infallible.)

It would seem that, right now, the only reasonable explanation of why music has this eerie, difficult-to-understand, incredibly enjoyable magic within it is that music is a symbol. In ten years, maybe there will be a revolution in musical theory or possibly philosophy that will overthrow this hypothesis and explain it all in an entirely different way. I can’t say for certain. But if you try to think back on times when you’ve listened to music and “experienced the magic” (not at Disney World), you might recall a sort of feeling of, huh, I don’t know where else I could get this quite as strongly as listening to this song. We think we’ve seen the magic somewhere else before, but music is where it comes right up close enough to almost touch us.

What is it a symbol for? That’s a question to which I don’t have an answer. But we have clues as to where to look. Why, for instance, is music used so often in movies? Is it because the audience would become bored if there wasn’t something else for them to listen to besides the dialogue? Certainly not. Listen to the soundtrack next time you’re watching a movie and you’ll notice that, in the scenes where the dialogue or the actions are sad, there will often be sad music playing, or, in scenes where the actors are supposed to be expressing a show of bravery and valor, there will be heroic music playing. Could this be because the magic exists behind that scene in the movie as well, and the music is the catalyst for bringing it out even more strongly? The mist or the veil between the human audience and the unknown essence that the film is trying to bring into our sight swiftly recedes and becomes much easier to see through when there is music helping us, acting as a more powerful symbol than even the script or the talents of the cast or the sweep of the camera. We have trouble understanding music, perhaps, but we can recognize it. And sometimes we need help recognizing whatever lies behind a scene in a movie, but if we can identify it and see it more closely we have a better chance of interpreting what it means.

Will we ever know? Why are we so strongly, almost inevitably, drawn toward music? Could it possibly be that someday the veil will drop completely and we won’t need the symbol anymore? Will the unknown suddenly become intensely familiar? Will that essence, that something of which we have up till now been allowed only a faint taste, draw us into its presence so that we can practically chug it down? Will the magic, that power which, every so often, overcomes us just a little bit, someday take control of us entirely and never let go? We might step off the map of human imagination, look around, and declare, “Now I understand. The reason I loved music so much is because it reminded me of this.”

That will be a glad day indeed.