Music Changes Us by Helen Henderson

Fire and Amulet by Helen Henderson
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I’ve been recently reminded that life is not always conducive to writing. To get back into the swing of things I’ve resorted to an old tool, music. Music has been the topic of several of my blog posts, usually to present the playlist associated with a given work. This post takes things into a slightly different direction and shares some thoughts on the affects of music.

Music stimulates the part of the brain that produces the dopamine hormone, which affects emotional behavior and mood. Research has shown that music may help improve mental health, reduce depression, enhance mood, and give strength to cope with problems. Research has shown that music can help you sleep better and elevate your mood while driving. Some studies indicate that music can even help you eat less.

The ability of music to jump start creativity has proven an aid an author. It allows us to feel all the emotions that we experience in our lives. Even without lyrics, a tune can evoke emotions that we capture with our own words. I admit I don't always listen to music when writing. Jotting notes in a doctor's office while waiting for your appointment or typing on a tablet in the wee hours of the morning isn't conducive to playing tunes. But that doesn't mean that music is not part of my writing life. Although each book tends to have its own playlist, certain songs trigger a mood or emotion so that the tunes transfer from book to book.

Music is an important part of some character’s lives. Ellspeth of the Windmaster Novels favorite relaxing pastime is composing music on her wooden recorder or silver flute. The theme continued in Windmaster Legend where both Iol and Pelra were skilled musicians. 

Bagpipes playing the lilting tune of “Garryowen” creates the image of a cavalcade of horses in a prancing, synchronized parade step. Even the same instrument can pull forth different emotions. Instead of claps accompanying the horses, the echoes of “Amazing Grace” played by a lone piper in a cemetery brings forth tears.

 For Fire and Amulet, an old standby, Celtic music where the lilting voices, flute and harp send my mind to a fantasy world where magic rules and dragon fly. On the player now is "Celtic Twilight" by Gabrielle Angelique. Music for a quest, hopelessness, and loneliness is conveyed by the haunting piano solo played at the end of each episode of The Incredible Hulk. "Twelve O'Clock High" the theme from the television series of the same name brings with it a vision of flight. Not of the B-17 bombers of World War II, but of a rust-colored dragon soaring in the clouds.

Sometimes a scene requires more than one song. Surviving a tornado was just the beginning. Deneas survives unhurt, but Trelleir suffers several broken bones. He cannot travel and Deneas cannot stay. At first I thought only one song fit the bill, Roger Whitaker's "The Last Farewell." Then I heard a few chords of "Unchained Melody" and that also resonated.  In the end, the two songs alternated on the spindle.

Whether you use music to boost your creativity as an author or to evoke emotions in your readers, understanding the music is important to a writer.

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 ~Until next month, stay safe and read.  

Find out more about me and my novels at Journey to Worlds of Imagination.
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Helen Henderson lives in western Tennessee with her husband. While she doesn’t have any pets in residence at the moment, she often visits a husky who have adopted her as one the pack. 

Music Soothes Troubled Times

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This winter, a friend coaxed me to join her choir. This wasn't something I'd thought of doing since high school. During my childhood and teens, I belonged to choirs at school and church. I enjoyed them and continued to like singing alone or at occasional public events, despite my diminishing vocal quality. No longer able to hit the high notes, my range became limited to about five notes. My voice cracked and stained by end of each song. The tones fell flat, to my own ears. 

My friend got into choir for something to do after she retired. Before then, she'd had no interest in singing and, unlike me, hadn't taken piano lessons as a kid. She explained that some choirs required auditions. Others don't, including Shout Sister, her all-female choir.

She gave me printouts of lyrics to her group's current roster of songs. Leonard Cohen., Simon & Garfunkel, The Beatles; my long-time favourites. I had spare time and was looking for activities this winter, since I was away from home in Ottawa, helping a relative through medical treatment.

"I've arranged for you to try out the choir this week," my friend said. She'd also convinced the  administrator to give me a special rate if I decided to stay, since I'd only be there for part of the year.

"Okay," I said, because she'd gone to all this trouble.

Wednesday afternoon, we drove to her choir practice at a local church. About seventy women, mostly seniors like us, stood in a horseshoe shape facing the choir leader. No sheet music. The notes  rose and fell with the leader's hand, a method of music reading I found easy to follow.

The meeting brought back memories of my youthful choirs. "Don't interrupt the line of music by taking a breath." The director echoed my earlier choir leaders. "Sustain the last note." The large group sang harmonies that sounded lovely to me. I found myself able to sing all the notes. Either the organizer selected songs suited to amateurs or she arranged them for unpracticed female voices.

Best of all, for those two hours of song I forgot my worries about my family member's health challenges. The choir had me hooked.

I looked forward to the weekly sessions. After two months, a woman I talked to during the break  convinced me to participate in the next week's concert at a retirement home. Performing with the group was fun and gave a new dimension to choir practice. Our concert ended with the 1970s O'Jay's anthem, Love Train, which urges people around the world to join hands and form a train of love. At the rousing finish, we were supposed to join hands with the person beside us. Some of us did; others refrained.

The following week our choir session was cancelled due to COVID-19. It soon became clear we wouldn't be singing for weeks and months. Then the organizers set up practices on Zoom, a virtual meeting site that has taken off in this time of home isolation.

I'm not swift with technology and worried I wouldn't figure out Zoom, but with a little advice, Zoom worked easily and well. Now, I follow the leader on my computer screen, while thumbnail pictures of choir members appear along the top or side. During breaks, I switch to gallery view, with thumbnails filling the screen. The first two weeks, over fifty members signed in each time. I'll miss week three since I'll be driving from Ottawa, west across Canada to my home in Calgary .

At the virtual Zoom session, the director puts us all on mute, since the system can't co-ordinate our voices. I discovered my voice doesn't sound as good alone as I sounded to myself with the group. It still cracks and strains for those high notes.

I wouldn't want to start with choir online, but virtually continuing with familiar faces and songs was more satisfying than I'd expected. Again, for those two hours, choir brought me out my despondent mood. For the first time since this mass isolation began, I felt that most of us won't be permanently damaged and we'll return to our humankind.

Shout Sister operates in numerous Ontario locations. Ottawa has three branches, with our afternoon group the most recent sister. Here's a YouTube video of one of our older sister groups performing Ben E. King's Stand By Me, a song our newer group learned this year. 

I have several friends in Calgary who belong to choirs. A year ago, I asked one of them what he gained from being in a choir. He said, "When you sing together, you make each other so much more." I agree.

   

The Musical Extinctions

The word “extinction” evokes images of dinosaurs and dodos, animals once plenty, but now existing only in the historical record.

Civilizations go extinct as well. Ancient Egyptian, Roman, Aztec and other societies have died off, either by violent conquest or cultural exhaustion. Along with them, artistic expressions—whether literary, dramatic, musical or otherwise—die off.

Another form of artistic extinction occurs when one culture becomes so pervasive and powerful that other cultural forms of expression become overwhelmed. This is the current situation.

Manipuri lady playing the Pena

I had the experience of this many years ago, when visiting the Indian state of Manipur, which is nestled in the north-eastern corner of the country, bordering Myanmar, near the Chinese border. As I was returning to my host’s home one evening, I had the surreal experience of being blasted with the strains of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” coming from a small roadside dwelling. Manipur is a rural society, whose traditional instruments are soft-sounding bamboo flutes, the pena (a lute played with a bow) and the pung, a two-headed drum. Indeed, the contrast was jarring.

Drum market in Zimbabwe

Traditional societies have an astonishing variety of instruments. For example, Zimabawe, a relatively small country in Africa, boasts the Ngome and Ingunga, just two varieties of several dozen types of drums of various sizes. Other percussion instruments include a peculiar drum played by rubbing and scratching that produces an unusual scratching sound, and the kanyeda, an instrument made of bamboo strips strapped together and filled with small seeds for percussion. Some traditional instruments facing extinction are the chinzambi, chipendai, tsuri, mukwati and wenyere.

And it is not just instruments that are fading away, but also musical forms and idioms. Traditional musical forms are very much tied into the spiritual narratives and mythologies of these societies. In many cultures, music is not regarded as a performance designed to make money for the artist but as a means of connecting with the sacred, which has reward in itself and is focused not on the artist, but on the object of the art.

The introduction of Western education, mostly by missionaries, effectively cut traditional cultures from their roots and thus provided the means for Western musical attitudes and idioms to enter. Indeed, youth in many traditional societies are trading in their instruments for guitars and drums and the musical idioms of their ancestors for rap and rock-and-roll.

Yo Yo Honey Singh

Examples abound: Yo Yo Honey Singh, a Punjabi rapper, whose explicit lyrics shock local sensibilities; K-pop music featuring Korean boy bands with hair dyed blonde blasting rock-n-roll in the Korean language; and Bollywood, the Indian film industry, which at one time featured exclusively Indian instruments, now giving way to Western music.

Music is distinguished by creativity and variety. Its diminution strikes at the very heart this artistic enterprise, leaving all of us poorer in its wake.

Mohan Ashtakala is a the author of "The Yoga Zapper - A Novel," www.yogazapper.com 

Published by Books We Love.