Before the Time of Music

Before the time of music, notes drifted about like the weather. Sometimes the sounds fit the scenery so well it was hardly noticed: clear chords as you awoke. Crescendoing symphonies behind a storm. In dissonance is when it was interesting. A circus ballad while you broke up with your lover. A funeral march while making love. The contrast illuminated living, cast it into bas relief in the neurons of the witnesses. The first man to harness music was a man whose first child died amid a flurry of chimed arpeggios. The first sounds captured were taps, the once irregular rhythm of life he learned to make himself with just a stick and stone. Others came later. Leather stretched over a ring of wood. Hollowed gourds filled with seeds. Musicians were seen as magicians who made the world around them bow to their pieced together creations which mimicked the natural noises so well they ceased to exist on their own. New instruments were constructed to make new sounds until only a few remained free. The spacious sound the wind makes. A heartbeat. Breath. The sound of waves. And silence.

Silence was heard as a noise before it was heard as the absence of noise. But no instrument however grand or complex could make it.

Music once gathered in big open places, like beaches and parks and plains, where there was so much music it gave the spaces a vibration like a fourth primary color, a fine dusting of sound. People gathered just to close their eyes and hear. Still sometimes you hear the echoes in a great place, a few feral notes baying for their brethren.