Author Description

Some say music is the universal language. This couldn't possibly be true. Not everyone speaks it; not all understand it. And even those who do cannot explain what it says. No one knows how music speaks, what tales it tells, how it tugs at our emotions with its mixture of tones, one after another, above and below. You can be moved by music and have absolutely no idea what is going on. Language is not like that. You must be able to speak a language to know what is being said. Music is only in part a language, that part you understand when you learn its rules and how to bend those rules. But the rest of it may move us even though we are unable to explain why. Nature is one such place. It can mean the place we came from, some original home where, as Nalungiaq the Netsilik Eskimo reminds us, "people and animals spoke the same language." Not only have we lost that language, we can barely imagine what it might be. Words are not the way to talk to animals. They'd rather sing with us--if we learn their tunes without making them conform to ours. Music could be a model for learning to perceive the surrounding world by listening, not only by naming or explaining.