The Musical Brain

Posted by koripop on Apr 16, 2010 in Thinking Out Loud | 1 comment

This tiny tale is about my awe for the person, place, animal or thing who designed what lives (of it’s own free will at times) beneath my skull.

DECEMBER 2009, I remember sitting at My Dog Joe between sets when all of a sudden – this popular tune popped into my head completely out of nowhere. No idea what the name of it was, I sang it to the people I was sitting with (I think) who could not recognize my a cappella/lyrically bare version of it. I thought it would be a great cover though and made a note to myself to look it up when I got home. As the night went on however, I forgot all about that moment.

APRIL 2010, rushing around getting stuff together before going into work. I run upstairs to pick up something from my blue piano room. As I pass the piano I get this overwhelming desire to sit down and play. I knew before my butt hit the bench that a song was about to be born. It was as though it had come to the surface at that very moment. So I sat down immediately, played a few chords to get the right key and then:

There it was.

Harmony and melody of course (lyrics NEVER come that easily to me). Three minutes or so later, that sensation of surfacing had subsided. I left for work, with my belly and my ears full of a new song. The next day I sat down and a bridge to this new little tune presented itself just as suddenly. Several times after I had played the song through, I realized how familiar one part of the melody was to me but I could not recall why. As I am driving to work, it hits me in a rush – that piece of melody – I had heard it five months earlier in a little cafe called My Dog Joe…

I have no idea why the tune came into my mind in the first place. Perhaps I had heard it on the radio waiting to pay for gas, or in a doctors office or at the grocery store. All I know is that some part of my brain – a part beyond my comprehension – seemed to have spent five months composing around that fragment of song I had absorbed.

The musical brain – an extraordinary machine.

The great Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore proclaims to his students with wet eyes: “Ah music…a magic beyond all we do here.”

k.