Faith in the universal language of music

The Age

24-05-2025

How do you find faith in people? How do you find, among the bombardment of grim daily news, the thing to hold onto that gives you faith? You listen. You watch, and then flowing from that, you feel. Where do these three things coalesce into one? Music.
Music is, after all, elementally the sound of the human within us. It is the rising of the emotions that in their forming describe the singular and the plural strands of a life. To see, and hear, the connection from creator of the sound to the listener is to have one's faith in people, at that most basic level of commonality, that we are all the one species, restored, if needed, and reaffirmed. It is a joy to behold.
Thus, it has been a joy to behold, and deeply moving, to have been watching the ABC series, The Piano. Here, a piano is set up centre stage in a public place, be it Southern Cross station or Preston Market, and piano players with no public profile are invited to play, to stretch their soul across 88 keys. Two quotes come to mind. As Beethoven said, 'Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.' Or as Frank Zappa said, 'Music is the best.'
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A lot of the players had a story behind what they played. They did not tell it through words but in the music. Call it the key of life, as Stevie Wonder did. Some performed their own compositions that spoke of an event in their life. There have been songs of survival, redemption and love.
The players captured it all in minor and major expressions, in the subdued touch and the hammered lightning. And, as equally importantly, in the space between the notes. You could see and hear the essence, the core of the creativity, flowing through heart and mind, down to the fingers, onto the keys, and then out into the air. This is where it fell into the hearts and minds of the audience. You could see it in their faces, the sway of their shoulders, the tapping of their feet. As a young player said, the piano holds the universe. As do the strings of a guitar. To paraphase Bob Dylan, and before him Walt Whitman, it contains multitudes, as do we.
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In these bustling, busy places of transport and commerce, the players revealed that music truly has no frontiers. There are no borders to stop its travel. Of course, some will not like a certain style, and that's fine. Others will. But when it hits you, you stop. Or as Bob Marley said, when music hits you, you feel no pain.
In the cacophony of wars around the world, in the cruel calculus of death and destruction, music is the haven. Of course, a sonata or a pop song cannot halt the flight of a bullet or missile, but it gives this: Faith, that through this universal language of music, we can all cross the bridge to the one humanity.