Music...makes the people...come together

This past weekend I ventured home to Maine to see the fam. It was nice to get back home for a few days, and to be able to show Mary and her sister Annie around my old stompin' grounds (Brunswick, ME: a lot like Noho, but cheaper and with less hipsters). One of the highlights of the weekend was catching a free show at L.L. Bean with Richie Havens -- one pretty hip old guy who opened Woodstock back in the day.

Now, I wasn't really excited about the show before going to it. I don't really know his music that well, and feeling somewhat introverted (see my last blog post), I really felt more like wandering around Freeport, finding a coffee shop, and getting some reading done. However, a few minutes into the show I became very glad that I decided to stay and listen. This is why.

Not being very invested in the show, I felt like an outsider, a situation that Susan Sontag once said (when speaking of the social position of the photographer) causes one to alternate between feelings of boredom and fascination. While there were certainly moments of boredom at the show (I didn't know the words to many songs, I couldn't sing along that much), I was mostly fascinated by the world of aging hippies that surrounded me. I watched them as they were transformed from a disparate collection of lawyers, nurses, teachers, and what have you into a collectivity -- brought together and made forty years younger by the sounds of their youth. They clapped and sang along, flashed peace signs, hollered, and whistled. Havens covered a number of old protest songs, and the energy of the crowd escalated as memories of past rowdiness and civil disobediance took on new relevance. I looked around, captivated by the bobbing heads and toothy grins that filled the darkening space around me.

This experience reminded me of the incredible power of music - to transport, to invigorate, to bring people together in a way that's hard to rationalize. There is something that music does to people that nothing else can. Despite Sapir and Whorf's hypothesis that we can only think within the confines of our linguistic ability, it seems that music can make you feel things that you often can't put into words. The way it can turn a moment into an event; the unique way it can celebrate and memorialize.

While it made me happy to see this, it also made me feel something like jealousy. I wish that I had the ability to do such things to people, to myself...

I'm going to buy some fingerpicks for my autoharp this week. You guys need to hold me to it. :)