Every now and then I relish in the memorial element of music. It happens anywhere. It happens when I hear Goo Goo Dolls on the radio in passing, when I hear a hymn in church, or a familiar song sung by a choir. Those all happen in passing. Other times, I select the songs to pay homage to a particular time in my life. If I were a painter, I could paint where I was, what I was thinking, what I thought I was like at those musical snapshots.

I’ve heard music talked about many ways, and one such way I still like to think about, especially in the more nostalgic times is the fact that music is at once temporal and eternal. It’s temporal because no matter how you capture it, a song or a musical excerpt is limited in time, but a recording or a memory of a performance lives on, and beyond that even the idea of it lives on even if all manuscripts are subsequently lost and no musician remembers the melody any longer.

I read an article in which a scientist was quoted saying, “From an acoustical perspective, music is an overstructured language, which the brain invented and which the brain loves to hear.” I think that is fairly apt. I like to think that music transcends language, but at times it can be little more than an “overstructured language.” And, perhaps part of how I remember the events surrounding music so well is that the overstructured language allows me to form deeper associations. 

I suppose I’ll give some examples, memories are of music and doused in particular colors:

One I always remember from the Lenten season is a beautiful Good Friday service in Plano wherein I was in a choir that alternated singing and listening to the string orchestra. They played a compelling “Adagio for Strings.”  We countered with Bruckner’s “Christus Factus Est.” I wept as though I was at a funeral service of a close family member. That moment is a benchmark of penitence and solemnity that unexpectedly crept up on me. All those memories are veiled in black, but only as much as a light shadow shields from direct sunlight.

Another moment is on a Spring Break trip to Los Angeles. I went out there on my own and stayed with a friend in the area. I didn’t spend a whole lot of money when I was out there because I mostly enjoyed the ocean air and sunsets. I matched the sunset with Jason Mraz’s “Sleeping to Dream.” I was pretty lonely at the time, but in a way that I can only romanticize after the fact as incredibly useful for my future enrichment. The colors from that moment are bright and springlike with some later-added blue hues.

The entirety of Damien Rice’s “O” album likewise reminds me of wanderings on the West Coast. I played through that album dozens of times with my high school girlfriend. I can remember the detail of the light moving from golden brown and golden orange in blonde hair. 

Other times are more simple. I move from moments to particular places. Múm takes me to first-floor Williams at the end of the hallway. Snow Patrol takes me to Williams 122. The Verve’s “Urban Hymns” takes me to my first college dorm room. John Mayer’s “Room for Squares” brings me to driving on back roads of Houston with no real destination in mind. Dashboard Confessional takes me wailing through The Woodlands in my middle years of high school.

Now, Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love” and Wilco’s “Sky Blue Sky” keep me suspended in time with the one I love deeply. 

Music really is, as I suggest in the title, a sonorous suspension in time–of both a temporal and eternal sense. I latch onto that as though I draw simultaneously closer to the essence of the now as well as the promise of an eternal. It’s this delightful paradox of grasping for something more finite and tangible and still longing for a revelation of the infinite and the as-of-yet-untouchable. 

I love it because sometimes I can see and experience both parts of the paradox in and through this adorned vessel that is the overstructured language of music.