"Music bypasses logic, and speaks directly to the soul"

 -Yanni Chryssomallis

The Path of Music, The Journey of Sound

The path into music begins with emotion, and ends with logic. The moment we stop feeling the music, we end traversing that path and we sink deep into the waves of the vibrational world. That feeling of loss and listlessness after your favourite music ends, yes I'm talking about that. 

But that cannot mean there is no method to the madness. All on earth follows some law of nature that was created and maintained and managed by a divine command. I posit that with logic, we begin piecing together what is essentially a preparation for a journey, committing to a path.

After that path with music ends, we can only continue into a refinement period that I can only call, a journey. That is when a bewilderment must not let us fade off into nothing but our lowest selves, yet instead continue with a going-on into the why and the how of music, instead of simply being engrossed in the what and the when, wherever it takes us to our desires.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul; if the visible arts with all its illustrations and visuals lend us a window into our spiritual being, then there is the door. But even for Music, it is not that door, neither is it even the door frame. We could liken Music to be the door knob, that which helps to unlock and grant entry.  If the window to our spiritual self is the world of light, then the door to our spiritual self is simply the world of sound, along with light considered vibrational realms built upon rules that take shape like mathematical geometry.

I passed through Music from the age of 7, entering the school band, remaining there well into my teenage years, which coincidentally ended at the age of 20. There was a time when I nearly got the chance to take 'O' levels for Music but.. I just did not have the support nor resources to pursue that path. At the end of 16 years I had already gradually began slipping on this path, never to completely recover my skills as a musician again. Some muscle memory still remains, but I can just barely play to entertain toddlers for 30 seconds now and maybe get a few laughs for it, hahah.

The Decline, and Dive into Poesy

But too much freedom is not a good thing, and I found some rest when I heard Arabic devotional poetry for the first time, and sang it for the first time.  That was when I sang Divans and litanies in praise of the saints and sages that brought us a rich intellectual tradition to cultivate.

This also unlocked a part of my brain which I did not know existed, or rather, it always existed and I just did not use it very often. Japanese became easy to me, besides Arabic, as I had been exposed to japanese pop/rock music during my time in the school bands and also later on in my late teens and early 20s. The patterns in speech and music fit together like a harmonic whole, where the wavelengths that coincide between resonant frequences hold a melodic charm higher than simple musical tunes. The miracle of recitation, repetitive chanting, and the way the sound affects the human mind and eventually rests in the heart became quite plain to my naive heart. I had never truly believed that people learn languages more easily through listening to their music, as I became good at English mainly through reading and writing only. As I did not have early access to the Walkman/Discman, and only later then the mp3 player, my deep and continuous exposure to music and the lyrical only began in my mid-to-late teens, where others had already been dripping with rap and metal and whatever contemporary since their prepubescence. 

By then, music and lyrics had little to offer me since my long-term conditioning into instrumental music in schools or through my home audio speakers where I would play my father's collection of Kitaro (Takahashi Masanori), or Yanni, besides other symphonic instrumentals that I had collected by ... childish ... means. At age 19 I had come to a point where I appreciated complex, "progressive" music much more than anything, and considered the mainstream music "trash". But I still could not accept the opinion that Music is haram. The idea of that was absurd to me because something so melodious and ubiquitous was impossible to make into haram. I had known Music much more differently than others did, as I considered what I listened to all the while as pure, unadulterated, true Music. That was until I heard the voices of the munshids that I met in Cape Town. I had already been singing some of the verses and still struggling to find my authentic, unpretentious, original voice but when I heard the real munshids with training sing the Divan and recite the Qur'an in person, it felt like I was a live audience to a stage. But that was it, it wasn't a staged performance. It was an outpouring of love and longing for one's Master. That was when I understood, at least for what I can say, in the world of Sound and Music, Intent is everything; and from it comes the meaning for Language to exist. For without this Divine secret of intention and love, there would be nothing to communicate for, no reason for anything to even exist as we know it!