Why it is important to attend a music concert

Namatayi and husband Charles Chipanga

By Lorraine Rutendo Nyahwa

MUSIC has always had a therapeutic effect on every living soul that many people haven’t mastered over the years.It’s never enough to listen to a song or your favourite music or even the music that you do not understand through a radio.

It is unfortunate that Zimbabwe has less than 40 percent outgoing people who have really connected with the soul of an artist or the soul of a musical piece.

After years of listening to Lucky Dube on radio, when I finally had a chance to watch his music video, I put a face to the music and everything started making sense and boom the connection was there. Same  thing happened when I listened to this youthful outfit called Chalenam Rhythms,my first impressions were that ‘Gospel Music’ is the same , repetitive choruses that I used to sing when I was young and there was nothing new on offer but this Percussive jazz approach to music made me think twice.

Technology has really made life even easier to put a face to music; YouTube, live streaming and Facebook has made people find it easy to put a face to the music and understand it better.Most Zimbabwean artists are now concentrating on live DVDs which is generally a way to put face tothe  good music that people are listening to everyday.

“It is the same reason why music will never be 100 percent a universal language,” Chipanga said. Generally you can’t appreciate artists more when you haven’t had an up-close and personal encounter with them on stage, when they put action and explanation to their music in a relaxed environment.

I do not want to get into a debate whether or not the language a song is written to makes a song universal or not. I want to focus entirely on the music, the notes themselves. Think “classical” music, for example, most of which are entirely wordless. I often listen to a radio that plays classical music, and they often describe before or after that what setting the music was written to – like theatre plays, dramas or operas. The feeling they transmit might be understood by the one’s watching the play at the moment. To me, as the radio listener, however, some tracks do not make sense for the described settings, at all.

Some tones or melodies might have a certain connotation to them, like violins can make you grasp the feeling of deep, desperate longing, as well as tell stories of fidelity, festivities and dancing people, depending on the way they are played.

Music can tell stories – but the story we perceive is entirely subjective, depending on our upbringing, experiences, memories associated with certain notes/strings of notes or our current moods. Listening to a piece of music, ripped out of its original “habitat” – which is for example, the theatrical play it was written for – can make the listener imagine an entirely different set of events or invoke different emotions in different people.

Music cannot evoke the same memory or deliver the same story that the “author” thought of when composing the tune to whoever listens – in fact, some pieces of music can only be understood or appreciated by people schooled in the subject, while to other it makes no sense at all.

Music cannot deliver the same message or imperative when repeated to different people.

“Dance to your hearts delight” is something you might be able to translate in a piece of music by the  way the score is written or the way it is played.

“Go and fetch me the newspaper”, however, might be easily translated into music, but not everyone you would play the notes for such an imperative to would understand the message immediately, not even schooled people.

Even emotional queues might not be caught the same way. Music CAN invoke emotions in people, connotations to memories they had or fire up their fantasies. But they will be different in each one of us. Thus i donot believe it is a universal kind of language.

Chalenam rhythms will put a face to their music on Saturday April 9 at the Zimbabwe German society, where they will be having their ‘season opener’. Having three albums  Prayer Expose, Grace moments and the latest Goodness, they promised nothing less than a better understanding of the inspirational music and the language behind it.

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