Feeling must be given its due, not as the absence of thought or logic, but as an ingredient fully melted into the mix of communication.
We can communicate feelings in the tonalities of speech. Any actor needs to be able to pull off this feat. There’s a feeling of defiance in Clark Gable’s famous line, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” or in Judy Garland’s tentative wonder that “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” But the ideal machine for feeling is music, with its cues imbedded in the ways that keys, chords, fifths, and so many other variations of the 12-note chromatic scale are used. Yip Harburg’s words to Harold Arlen’s Over the Rainbow for the Wizard of Oz marry its central idea of yearning to a rising pitch sequence ending in a high C. He could have easily written affettuoso (“with feeling”) to set the tone for the music. Harburg famously noted that “Words make you think thoughts, music makes you feel a feeling . . .” Music is the tonal and non-stipulative dimension of communication. It pushes the process of connecting into a larger sphere. It follows, as Harburg noted, that “a song makes you feel a thought:” a natural marriage of what is too often represented as polar opposites.
You can easily assess your response to music as feeling triggered by sound in this unusual example of Over the Rainbow—usually sung in a hopeful key of Ab Major—transposed here into a minor key. It conveys more of a feeling of melancholy than hope: not what we would expect to hear from a child with more visceral emotions. The unusual departure to a minor key version of the song below by sillyjet invites us feel differently about what it means.
Why does this matter? Music is more than a metaphor here. Quite simply, like spoken language, music is another form of aurality that reminds us that communication as a medium of exchange is not a one dimensional process. Like a phrase or a chord, any word from a source sets in motion a dynamic progression of listening and reacting that is more open-ended than the idea of communication as ‘exchange’ would suggest. In essence, our reception of another’s message triggers projections from within that surface in the form of feelings.
The use of language or its musical equivalents always have tendency. Through our unique perceptions we are the co-creators of another’s message. So, feeling must be given its due, not as the absence of the logical, but as a sum of all of its parts melted into the mix.
