15. 15 on April 15th

Hello, Welcome. I’m Renée Valentina and this is Musing Interruptus. Musing Interruptus is a podcast for sharing thoughts and stories and enjoying idiomatic phrases. You can read along; just click on continue reading in the description to open a Google Doc with the transcription of this episode. The idiomatic expressions are in italics. Try to get the meaning from the context and then look them up to see if you were right. If you like it, subscribe, follow, and share, but more importantly, continue the conversation. Drop a comment with your answers to today’s questions! I love hearing from you! The background music is called Within Garden Walls by Blue Dot.

The mix and master were done by Chuy/Jesús Darío, my sound charolastra

What would the world be without music? 

Just noise.

In the beginning, it was dark, and quiet was interrupted by clamors and clutters, knocks, knuckle raps, the rhythmic sounds of intercourse, yips and yelps, cries, collapses, wind rustling through trees, firecrackling, the sounds of destruction and creation, the roar of the waves, and the fury of the rain. From gentle and inviting to mind-numbing and deafening.

It was dark, even when light shone through, beckoning us to organize, repeat at certain intervals, and communicate. Percussions that traveled from our mother’s hearts through umbilical cords and cells and atoms. The beats that would mark humanity's artistic expression of sound. The hearts that set the beats to one of humanity’s greatest developments. Music.

It was how the leaf and bamboo reeds became flutes, hunting bows, lyres of Ur, and eventually guitars. Eventually, happened over and through North and East Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Mediterranean, the Greek, Roman, and Spanish empires via the Moors. Too much to mention in a few lines… Too important not to notice.

From the randomness and chaos of earthly existence to the systematization of sounds to a beat, humanity arrived at symphonies, a collectivity communicating our history and experience. Strings and winds and percussions and brasses that have accompanied our existence. Crippling solitude is an illusion via the realization that it is not unique. Oh, it is shared across grids and ranges. Music surrounds our senses, not just the auditory. That is only part of it. It is the vibrations that emanate from the earth through our limbs, the intention and intensities, the command of interpretation. What of the lyrics? If any? Words that accompany and explain our existence by regaling victories and failures, articulating feelings, all the feelings, basic and complex. All our thoughts. Weaving in and out of fiction, immortalizing, making that which is internal visible and known. 

Pendular movements are traced in the evolution of musical expressions. You must learn the classics to appreciate the contemporary. To hear the resistance and how musicians push back, push forward, creating genres. None isolated. All embryonic creations paying tribute to the mother’s heart.