Music for Every Moment

I was recently at dinner with a non-musician friend who volunteered a short and concise theory on the integration of music and everyday experience. He said “there’s a perfect piece of music for every moment.” It’s a wonderfully direct yet jarring statement, or at least it was for me. In fact, isn’t that little codicil (“for me”) precisely the issue? I am capable of doing what he says, of subjectively evaluating some auditory sensory input in terms of its fit in the moment for me. But wait a second… can such an evaluation be perfected for every moment?

Not dissimilar to Lewis Black’s famed stand-up bit about having overheard a stranger say, “if it was for my horse I wouldn’t have spent that year in college,” my friend’s theory both caught me by surprise and also bored into my ear, lodged itself deep in my brain, and refused to be ignored. A couple questions needed to be asked:

    “You mean for one particular style of music or across all styles?”

    “Yeah, doesn’t matter. Any style.”

    [Then came the kicker…] “Wait, so there’s a perfect piece of existing music for every moment? Something that’s already been recorded?”

    “Yeah, something you can listen to.”

My internal monologue went a bit haywire at this point. I quickly realized that the claim wasn’t something he just made up off the cuff. He’d given this pet theory some thought— probably a fair amount of thought over a fair amount of time spent listening to music he likes. Realizing he both believed in and seemed to care for his idea only deepened my confusion. My mouth couldn’t keep up with my thoughts, so my questions imploded. How much music does he know? How much music would it be necessary to know for such a theory to gain credence? Enough music to fill the duration of one’s life, for sure. But if one were to know (have already listened to) enough music to fill the duration of one’s life, wouldn’t that mean the person was dead? Furthermore, if I acknowledge that “moments” may pass quicker than a given piece of music, then is music overlapping the music of the previous moment ideally more perfect? And considering the temporal nature of listening, if moments are identified internal to a piece of music itself, then is momentary perfection really a nested hierarchy that would require me to consider the perfect piece of music for a particular moment within a perfect piece of music for the moment I’m living both physically and mentally? What possible corpus of recorded music is sufficiently vast and sufficiently differentiated enough to fulfill the requirement of continual perfection (however ill-defined) in its alignment with each moment? And given such a corpus, how is it possible to search (one’s memory or even a database) for the perfect piece without the elapsed search-time constituting a moment demanding of its own perfect musical correlate? These questions alone serve to sufficiently complicate the issue, undermining any lingering hope that perhaps his theory could be true when taken at its word.

And yet, isn’t it kind of sad that my friend’s theory is not true? Doesn’t there remain some degree of truth here that I seem to be circling around?; a truth that shows itself in my drive to further question the veracity of his theory— to resolve the nagging mismatch between lived experience and some finite repertoire of recorded music that maps life exhaustively— despite the jarring impossibility of it?

I think our desire to match music to moments is a reflection of our desire to reach beyond the finitude of lived experience, our limited spatial and temporal perspective on the world as individuals. A quick anecdote might be of use here. As a kid, I listened to my Sony DiscMan portable CD player on family car trips and as we neared our destination I would explicitly seek a final song to listen to, one that provided both a denouement for the auditory narrative I’d woven for myself across the car ride and whose duration would coincide with the exact time remaining until arrival. What’s remarkable here, is that my selection was as much a matter of hope as it was retroactive analysis. The moment I sought to match had yet to occur; the music needed to end and thus complete my listening experience at the exact moment the car arrived at my family’s destination. Musical fit (a perfect choice of song) existed in relation to my imagined point of arrival, both its quantitative and qualitative dimensions. I hoped to arrive at some direct co-incidence between virtual and physical experience, such that the physical and sensory limitations of travel could be transcended through some thoughtful musical prefiguration. This behavior was my young attempt to answer the “are we there yet?” question for myself. Red lights sucked, by the way (and they still do).

Of the many implications of my friend’s “momentary perfection” theory of music, the sadness of its impossibility in reality is perhaps mitigated by the obviousness with which music affects each of us in its temporality and our hope for its future possibility. To return to the moment when my friend affirmed that momentary experience could be mapped completely by existing music, I immediately realized that his theory left no room for composition. If human experience has been mapped exhaustively by existing music, what place is there for the new? Composition must take the place of no-place at all. In fact, if we acknowledge that the set of all moments is un-totalizable, both in material configuration as well as subjective constitution, then the impossibility of perfection in reality doesn’t bar the notion of perfection from re-imposing itself as an ideal. Perfection can still become operative without actually existing. The ideal match between music and moment produces a future co-incidence between physical and mental states that is forever yet-to-be, while nevertheless productively setting the stage for retroactive evaluation. Perfection is either attained or thwarted by listening to an imagined future in relation to that which was heard, be it last year or a second ago. In this way, my friend is correct, there is truly no place for composition in its momentary alignment with lived experience. However, composition’s place of no-place at all productively extends the hopeful possibility of perfection. To compose is to hope for some co-incident arrival regarding an aural past we have yet to hear.

© 2014, Sean Peuquet. All rights reserved.

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