Unhurried Music

Have you ever listened to a beautiful song and felt like savouring its after-taste for a few minutes after it finishes playing? Only to be hurried on to listening to the next one in your play list? The one feature I’d like very much to have on such players is a configurable interval between songs. It is like eating at a feast. You like to take your time with each course.

Multitasking is another thing I can’t handle with music. I don’t like my mind to be actively occupied when I listen to music. So maybe it is a good companion on a leisurely walk (not a commute) or while travelling in a bus or a train or while cooking. Activities like reading and surfing the internet engage the mind. So does music. In a sense, isn’t having to do them in parallel a sign of a hurried life?

Need a prison to savour breaking free

I’d like to share some delightful lines from The Ode Less Travelled – a book that promises to help you unlock the poet within. There is a chapter about the iambic pentameter – a simple set of rules governing the most widely used metre in English poetry. The author says that you sometimes need to bend the rules to achieve dramatic effect. So we have techniques called enjambment and caesura – crucial liberators of the iambic line.

They either extend or break the flow, allowing the rhythms and hesitations of human breath, thought and speech to enliven and enrich the verse. They are absolutely not a failure to obey the rules of pentameter.

…

It is often the feeling of the human spirit trying to break free of constrictions that gives art its power and its correspondence to our lives, hedged in as ours are by laws and restrictions imposed both from within and without. Poets sometimes squeeze their forms to breaking point, this is what energizes much verse, but if the forms were not there in the first place the verse would be listless to the point of anomie. Without gravity all would float free: the ballet leaps of the poet’s language would lose almost all their power. ‘Souls who have felt too much liberty’, as Wordsworth said, welcome form:

“In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is:”

…

Indeed it is one of the paradoxes of art that structure, form and convention liberate the artist, whereas openness and complete freedom can be seen as a kind of tyranny…As Auden suggested in his analogy of Robinson Crusoe, some poets might be able to live outside convention and rules, but most of us make a hash of it.

Every once in a while, I think that rules are for conformists and that one is probably better off as a rebel, an iconoclast. The lines above serve to temper such thoughts.