The Tenderness of Music in Times of Scarcity

For more than 2 months, I had been unable to listen to the music that I love. I had been listening to this really evoking music for weeks and finding it charming. Then the outages happened and I lost track of what I was listening to. In fact, I forgot about it. I didn't remember the names and didn't manage to download anything until I was hit with capped internet, 3 gigabytes a month, until yesterday, when we finally got our services restored.

And now that I listen to it after so many weeks of listening to the same tracks (5 albums I downloaded 10 years ago, that I've listened to over and over again), I have a very familiar feeling. I've had it before when I went hiking and I needed to rest, or water, or food, and then finally got it. I've had it when I solved a long-had problem. It's relief mixed with pleasure and a sense of meaning, a little voice that says "this is what life is for, the moments that make it all worth it".

Now, every track I hear is a delicacy and each piece a masterpiece.

I know that there are people who live without music. I myself have spent many months when I went without music and didn't miss it in the least. It was mostly during trips, however, and there was no boredom involved but continuous mental activity, exhausting myself every day, not having time to think about music or many of the other things I take for granted in my day-to-day. Leisure can do that: display needs one didn't even think about before. It's both the price and the gift of privilege.

I also know that most people don't appreciate music as much as I do. I think that music is the only thing in life that gives me such intense feelings. Maybe that and reading really good books.

a tunisian man

This track, for example, is the living image of what I referred to. Sometimes you don't even know that you need a random Tunisian man squealing in your ear. But when you have it, it's a pleasure that's better had than not had.

a samba

When this song started, I thought it was in Spanish, but then I realised it was just Portuguese. I also never knew that this kind of samba existed, mixed with rock, and so beautiful, until I found it. (It's one of the last tracks I listened to before the national outages started.)

música llanera ("music from the plains", a Venezuelan genre)

This song starts like a European/Iberic folk song, then by 2:30 you start hearing a little harp raising its voice, little by little, little by little, until by 3:00 any Venezuelan can clearly hear our national folkloric “música llanera”. It’s funny how I was hearing German and Gypsy music and it jumped to this, and I recognised the melody of the “arpa llanera” (harp of the plains) at once.

Then they start to sing and it’s a bit strange haha. They didn’t pick the best singers, in my opinion, but the folky atmosphere is nicely evoked. Then more violins and everything turns European again until around 8:05 when the harp starts raising its voice almost hysterically wanting to be listened to, until the end.

I think the harp is what I always enjoy the most from Venezuelan folk music and I really appreciate that it was the instrument that they showcased in the song.

oral poetry

Oral poetry is very different from written poetry. Oral cultures are also very different from cultures that have developed written systems and where most people know how to read and write. Oral cultures also develop many mnemonic resources that make their productions oh so so different from what we're accustomed to. A nice overview of this topic is Professor Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy

I was re-inmersed into this topic when I read The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, where I started seeing the possibility of the rebirth of an oral culture. They had written language, but I started thinking much more about this.

For me, oral cultures are the most magical thing that exist, because for them words are not only what they mean but they are almost establishing and reinforcing what they say. If you talk about the "Great Old Green Serpent", you are not only referring to it as a simple subject matter but as something that has to be remembered to protect the existence of your culture, traditions and civilisation. Every tiny bit is important.

I oversimplified the topic, but it was all to say that this song, even though it sounds very simple, can be interpreted as a magnificent display of oral tradition, and is one of the best ones I've heard.

ukraina

I didn't know that people from the now-thankfully-defunct Soviet Union were just called "Soviet". I had always called them "Russian", but apparently that was their demonym. I learned this when I was reading about the band Kino and their leader Viktor Tsoi.

I also listened to all the tracks published on Spotify under Kino, and then started a radio playlist with all the related musicians. It turns out that Kino started a whole wave of rock in the whole Soviet area and there are still bands being influenced by them. I added many of these to my favourited tracks. The last one I added was apparently from Ukraine, a band founded on 1994 (so not actually in the USSR, which kinda reinforces the point that Kino influenced the whole Soviet Union and more, and not just Russia).

It also makes me wonder, do Ukrainians call Ukraine "Matushka Ukraina" like the Russians call Russia "Matushka Rossiya" (Mother Russia)? Probably not, judging from the Google results.