Après un rêve, or, Why Hello There.

Last night I dreamed I was driving down an overgrown country road at the height of a sun-drenched summer. I don't know where I was going or where I was coming from, but suddenly the car’s radio crackled to life and out came an old Ruthenian song. It was the kind of piece you’d expect to hear in a smoky bar on Brighton Beach full of shady post-Soviet itinerants playing cards. The bass player has to hold his instrument at an odd angle to fit it under the low-hanging ceiling, the cimbalist is trapped behind his cimbalom, backed into a three-sided corner, the violinists must be careful not to impale one another on their bows, the accordionist sits sideways on a stool with a dreamy expression on his face, singing the sentimental songs of the old country…play on, gypsies, play on…
And it was that same old song that was going through my head as I awoke in a half-dreaming haze of nostalgia. I’d played that song too once, at the very end of the summer in a strange little neighborhood in Queens. Those days are gone, as are the ones before it and the ones before those, as I’m always reminded in this time of year when the leaves are falling and the sun seems to be giving up on life.
But Proust had his madeleines and I have my songs. Putting my iPod on shuffle is the next best thing to having a time machine, and I can travel half the world without going more than three blocks in any direction from my apartment.
Just today, when I went to the laundromat, the place’s Chinese owners were listening to some Bollywood-sounding music on their radio. Three notes of that and I was instantly transported back to my freshman year of college and the strange long nights hanging out with my friend across the hall, listening to Pakistani rock and gossiping about our latest Model United Nations meeting. Ten minutes after putting in my laundry, I was eating a muffin at the bakery across the street, where they were inexplicably playing German pop songs from the 80s and 90s. And there I was back in my childhood briefly spent in Scandinavia, where any time you turned on the radio out came either ABBA or whatever was topping the charts in Berlin.

Music has always had a power over me that nothing else, not even any other of the arts, can claim. Poetry comes close, but in the final estimation there is something unexplainable and unearthly about music that, the more I think about it, the more it bewilders me. What is it about certain combinations of longer or shorter sounds at different frequencies, vaguely approximating certain natural laws, that can evoke faraway places, stir intense emotions, and preserve, in a way, a composer’s living soul? Why does music even exist, where does it come from? Whether God or Nature or some combination of the two created humankind, you just have to wonder where, when and why the instinct for music got thrown in.

So here I am, at some unknown point after midnight, listening to the rain outside my windows briefly make me forget that I live in the middle of Manhattan. And for some reason, I’ve decided to start a blog, writing about music. I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into. This could go one of several ways, two of the more unfortunate possible scenarios being I post one more entry and give up, or I accidentally become a critic.
But, as any composer knows, the hardest thing about writing anything is the first three lines, and deciding what to write for my First Blog Post was no different. Next time, I’ll actually have something to say, or a nice YouTube find to post, or anything. But for now, my mind is fogged like the windowpane and it’s just raining.