The String Age
If we hadn’t one day knelt to willow and pulled horsehair taut, would our souls have lost their voice?
Music is surely the distinction between beings who harbour a soul and beings who do not. Melodies and harmonies, no matter how guttural or harsh, have always escaped from beaks and mouths and leaves. Like blood from a burst vein.
Did evolution lead us to instrumental music like it did to fire? While we could make sounds with our throats and our hands, was the creation of reverberating string symbolic of another age? The String Age? Did our fingers and wrists evolve to sustain the precision required to harness the voice of vibration? Did friction between hair and gut create the same spark as flint and steel?
Without human connection, our souls wither fast.
It’s the same for nature: if we ignore our outstretched longing for natural surroundings, the essence of our spirit becomes dull and passive. Perhaps musical expression was prophesied to quench these thirsts together. Perhaps our tool for interaction was always meant to be the percussion of roots and branches.
Did you know that trees sing? Music is as innate to us as it is to the earth’s green skin. You can attach sensors to leaves and translate the waves they produce into melodies. If you mimic this music using a bow and string, you can speak the language of the trees.
What does it mean to imitate the voice of beings who are centuries old? Do we have a right to tune into their consciousness? Should we strive to adopt their rhythms in order to root ourselves alongside their memory? Or would that plagiarise prehistoric musings?
While verbal communication developed, did we ever consider the superior accuracy of the musical language? Its seemingly infinite opportunities for arrangement? How would the world be different if we based our primary mode of communication on instrumental, melodious rhythm? If we considered the vibration of vocal cords secondary to the vibration of wooden bellies?
Would our architecture rely on sound sculpture? Would our literature be printed along the five lines of a stave? Would we speak with closed lips, our muscles adapting to utilise vibrations and echoes as they did to employ paper and ink?
Did the beings who first practised unnatural, fluttering shapes up and down wooden necks foresee the potential for these instruments? Did they lean their heads into those hollow bodies and immediately understand their balance?
If novels were written on the four-lane roads of the treble and bass clef, multiple lines of consciousness could be portrayed simultaneously. War and Peace might be a symphony, The Waves a sextet, and The Catcher in the Rye a sonata. Prodigies might be prolific authors and lullabies would replace bedtime stories. Film scores would encompass dialogue; actors would deliver soliloquies as cadenzas. High-quality performance would require expressive musicianship. To have a beautiful voice would be to have elegant and powerful fingers.
Theatres would be built with acoustic diffusing discs and floating floors. The orchestra pit would not be occupied. Instead, a conductor would be projected onto every angle of the stage, beating the rhythm of the lines, shaping the narrative of the acts with arms that understand the shape of a hundred voices. Those voices would take centre stage.
However, while speech invites perceptive variation, so does music. Our clarity would be just as polluted.
The identity formed by language would be lost. Removing the distinct timbre of voice would make room for impersonation and deception. Relying on a tool would make us vulnerable to heat, cold, expansion, and contraction. A broken bridge is a broken bone. A new bow is a new tongue. You could wrench steel strings, ripping a person’s voice.
Amplifiers would be weapons. Volume would signify power. We would still live under the rule of ugly, atonal minds.