Music

Not all sound is music. Sound becomes music when someone chooses it: this sound, then that one, each at its own time, and the choosing feels right. Below most music there is a sound that happens at the same distance in time — one, two, one, two — like the part inside you that pushes your blood. Your foot knows it before you do: it starts moving, and no one asked it to.

The tools

People made music with their bodies before they made it with tools. Most music holds a person's words, said high and low, long and quick, each at its own time.

The first music tools were things you hit. Then people made the others: hold a string pulled hard, and touch it, and it says a sound — make a smaller part of the string move, and the sound goes up. Breathe into a tube with holes in it, and cover the holes, and the sound changes. That is most of it: things you hit, strings you touch, tubes you breathe into. Some tools now make their sounds with electricity, and machines make music as well — a woman wrote, two hundred years before now, that they could one day, and she was right.

What it does

No one knows why music does what it does. It is air moving — that is all it is — and then it is water in your eyes. Sad music can feel good, and no one can explain this. Music from your young years can take you back through time like no other thing: you hear three sounds, and you are small in a room you had not thought about for years.

The first music you heard was a parent making small, low music to help you sleep. You cannot think back to it now, but your body heard it.

With each other

People make music most when they are with each other. People who hold to a god make music all as one, in the buildings with the coloured light. Soldiers move their feet to it, all at the same time. And much of the music people love most grew from the people who were owned, who made it in the ground where they worked because it was the one thing no one could take.

Another part of this book says that people make music about love more than about all other things, and asks you to turn on a radio and count. Count. It is most of it.

The birds were making music before there were people, and they start each day with it. We are not the first.

No one has to explain it

All countries have different words, different food, different gods. All of them have music. No one carried it from place to place: it grew in each place on its own. Where there are people, there is music — all places, all times. It is a thing no one has to explain to a child. A child with two pieces of wood knows what to do.