Music, silence!

Publish date 05-12-2020

by Mauro Tabasso

Last night I watched in streaming the movie Aquaman, one of the many in the Marvel Superhero family. Holy shit that envy! What Marcantonio, what kind of muscles, unkempt / transgressive hair and beard, tattoos that look like scales, and then how he travels through water. I have never been a swimming phenomenon; but if they gave me the part of Acquavite-man in any film, that's it, that would really come from god. After all, I have always thought that water is for external use.

And the music? What is the music for? I have often wondered. Common sense could be said that she too is for external use. In short, its main uses certainly include recreation, concerts, stages, theaters, the public, and then dances, dance halls, discos, which this summer have sparked discussions and aroused so much uproar. Among its uses there is also rituality, where music has always played an almost sacred role. But there is also a use that is often underestimated or overlooked: warfare. From time immemorial at the head of the armies there is a crowd of winds and drums that help the soldiers to march in order, instilling them with courage and helping them and not concentrating on fatigue, intimidating their opponents at the same time. The military use (intended as offensive) of music is perhaps the oldest and most "external" of all. We often deny it because we are incurable romantics, convinced that it must serve to create dialogue and spread the culture of peace. Tell this to General Custer's trumpeter, the first man to fall in the Battle of Little Bighorn (June 25, 1876). In fact, his trumpet (a system still in use by the French troops in the "very recent" Vietnam War) was the only means that the general had to give orders in a crowd of men, horses, shots, arrows, screams and who knows what other. The trumpeter with his high-sounding blasts transmitted the commander's orders, and this made him a highly sensitive target, without which the army would have been virtually beheaded. Music is like countless other discoveries and inventions of man, made good or bad by the use we make of it. But I am convinced that today a very healthy internal use of music has returned to great relevance.

We can use it to relax, to distract ourselves or to concentrate better, or simply to enjoy its beauty in intimate tranquility. Ingesting it, digesting it, internalizing it, alternating it with large silent expanses is a wonderful way to find ourselves and our emotional space, away from the world, from the media, from social networks, from programs that take us far from who or what we really are. Silence is to music like brandy to our body. Drunk every day, it intoxicates and creates addiction, or slavery. Enjoying it every now and then, not only does one live longer, but also savors it differently. The same is true for music. If we do not clean our ears with a bit of very healthy silence, not only will we no longer be able to hear it, but we no longer even hear our voice (since it is usually in silence that speaks to us). Thus we become slaves to the noise, which reassures us because it makes us hear nothing else, but takes us away from the place that was thought of by us. Away from that place, like Aquaman in the desert, like me away from a cellar, we can only be miserable.

 

Mauro Tabasso

NP ottobre 2020

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