666 : Do you need to understand music to love music?

I adore music. It is my passion. I use it to soundtrack all that I do. When I travel I am accompanied by music (I am composing this on the 5.05 to London Euston with Beneath a Steel Sky’s “Cleave” keeping me company). At home various Alexa’s pump out albums of both my, and increasingly my children’s, choice. Live shows are my emotional crutch and the landmark dates I use to get myself through the year. Music proliferates my speech, with musical analogies my chosen way of describing things. It is central to who Stewart Lucas is and I would be lost without it.

Yet I have no musical ability. I cannot play a musical instrument, I cannot hold a tune and I have no grasp of musical theory. I once dated a music teacher who patiently tried to explain time signatures to me but it just went in one ear and out the other. How music comes into being is a complete mystery to me, yet I still love it. I view its creation in the same way I view the work of say David Blaine, Penn and Teller and David Copperfield. I have no idea how they do what they do but that doesn’t stop me being enraptured and astonished by the illusions and what they conjure up. 

The point of this diatribe is to wonder whether you need to being musical to get music? I know certain instruments make certain sounds (I’m not that ill-informed) but I’m all at sea if you want me to differentiate 4/4 from 6/8 time. That’s  before we get to the dark arts of notes, tremolos and pitch. All of that is a foreign language to me. I can tell when something is up or down tempo (I know the difference between a dreary Adele self-pitying ballad and a Hi-NRG dance floor filler) but aside from speed I am lost to what they are doing with the musical form to make them sound differently.

Yet I still know what I love and can articulate what the music makes me feel. And that is my defence. I don’t know how it is made and certainly would not have a clue where to start to create it myself, but I can feel the excitement. I know what these sounds and aural textures do to my psyche. If you are inclined to read back on the hundreds of reviews I have produced over the last seven years you would find one connecting factor, the description of the ambience. 

Music for me is Art and Art is a medium that connects you to your emotions. My critiques are not about how well the instruments are played or the quality of the musicians because I am in no way qualified to comment on that. It is about what it does to me and the people that I am sharing the experience with.

Music connects me to my feelings and makes me feel whole. It invigorates my senses and feeds my soul. In the same way that I don’t need to know how this train works to allow it to take me to London, I don’t need to know how a song is put together for it to move me. It stirs something within me and makes my heart beat faster. I know what I like (death and black metal) and I know what I don’t like (Sleep Token) but that is guided by the emotions that they churn up within me as opposed to their intricate construct.

So does my lack of musical aptitude affect my ability to write about music? Well if I am honest you dear reader are the judge of that! I certainly look at it differently to our contributors who have been in bands, but in many ways that preserves my wonder. Everytime I hear a guitarist lay down a sick riff I am again that impressionable youngster dumbfounded by a card trick he can't explain. Music is my joy even if it is an unexplained one.