Everything goes. Desires, toys, clothes, possessions, passions, dreams: everything goes, inevitably. Whether through the ordinary wear of life or the arbitrary arrival of death. On the other hand, the awareness that we cannot hold on to anything in our hands leads us to seek ways of preserving moments and feelings.
Like a jeweler, we set the brightest moments into the silver of time, treasuring each jewel as a millionaire grandmother’s inheritance. These are the talismans that shape our personality and fill our lives with purpose and meaning. Among them, one of the ways human beings have devised to create and preserve memory is music.
Now, let me tell you a story. There was a boy in my high school class who didn’t care about music, saying that it played no role in his daily life. His name was Rodrigo. I caught him in the lie when, at a school party, I saw him singing his heart out to Pense em Mim, as recorded by the duo Leandro & Leonardo in 1990. To me, it simply did not add up that someone who didn’t care about music could know the entire lyrics of a song. To pull that off, he must have listened to that song enough times to memorize the words. Then again, perhaps it doesn’t surprise me: Rodrigo was a dedicated boy.
Like him, many people surrender themselves to the stories engraved in songs. If you were to take off your headphones and pay attention to the people around you, you would notice how some let precious melodies slip from their lips while waiting for the bus or walking down the sidewalk. It is no coincidence that the development of popular music, and later, of the music industry, has been grounded in a communicative logic that extracts experiences from space and time, reshaping them into new objects. Objects like rings and earrings, because composers are no different than jewelers, of sound and language. Whenever someone hums a tune on the subway, it is as though that fragment of music holds a jewel from the past in the present.
But let us return to Rodrigo. He was not trying to convince anyone of his Don Juan charms when he belted out the line, “instead of spending your time thinking about him”. More likely, he was identifying with the song’s character, who suffers from not being valued by the person they love. He might have been thinking of his father, his brother, or even one of his teachers, it makes no difference. A song becomes meaningful to its listener when it resonates with their own reality, regardless of the intentions behind its creation.
A few days ago, on February 25th, to be exact, would have been George Harrison‘s birthday.
The English guitarist and singer, a member of The Beatles, passed away in 2001 and was honored the following year by friends and fellow musicians. The result was a monumental concert that resulted as a DVD and a double album. Among the classics of nearly four decades of his career, the most moving moment is the song that closes the performance. I’ll See You in My Dreams was written by Isham Jones and Gus Kahn, but its first landmark recording was made in 1939 by Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. Django and Stéphane were an amazing duo. They had a swing and dazzling virtuosity stood in striking contrast to the melancholy that so often defined their repertoire — being Reinhardt always the star of the show. A Romani in Belgium, Django lived in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France. Constantly under threat, he carried in his music with the burden of the violence inflicted upon his people and, although his rendition of I’ll See You in My Dreams is entirely instrumental, Gus Kahn‘s lyrical narrative is still perceptible: someone finds solace from the hardships of the world by holding on to the memory of a loved one. That person is no longer there, yet he is certain they will meet again in his dreams — and that reunion will solve everything. For Django, that was his own reality; families torn apart by barbaric laws clung to the memory of love as an act of resistance.
Sixty-three years later, Joe Brown, a musician and close friend of George Harrison, chose the very same song to bring the tribute concert celebrating George‘s life to an ending. Here, the song takes on a different role, with a man who, singing of the friend he misses, fill the romantic lyrics with new meanings.
For example, the line that evokes “lips that once were mine”, perfectly captures the audience’s bond with the unmistakable voice of the man being honored: a voice is no longer physically present, but will never fade from the memory of those who were once touched by its brilliance.
Though coming from entirely different contexts, Rodrigo, Django, and Joe feel the same thing in these songs: saudade (longing). This peculiar state in which absence is made present is essential to the experience of identification. Joe mourned the loss of a friend. Django carried the grief of his people’s suffering. And Rodrigo, if it was not some mysterious case of unrequited love, was moved to sing that day by the pleasure of surrendering to the memories awakened by Pense em Mim.
And so, all the things in life go on in their own time. We may even forget our moments of pain, our loves, and the dangers of our existence. But to create a song, every emotion must be confronted with courage until it has been carefully polished. Its rough edges are smoothed. Its scratches, repaired. Every piece is fitted into place, allowing the original memory to become the substance for new stories.
It is as though music could crystallize each listener’s present moment into real eternal diamonds.