The Value of Art

I’ve always been one to enjoy instrumental music. I remember growing up listening over and over again to my father’s cassette of the guitar band The Shadows. I’d close my eyes and follow the tune in my head, picturing the little musical notes riding up and down the scale.

And despite not having any words at all to convey what it’s trying to say, instrumental music had a way of conveying its own meaning to the listener. They get you excited, sad, happy, light, sombre, tense and even playful just simple by the progression and pattern of notes. And that kind of resonated in me. That magically, emotions can be conveyed and feeling can be shared with not so much as a word. There is something so simple, so beautiful, and so mysterious about to me.

I have been described as a person of many words. But what people don’t understand about me is this – words fail me sometimes. There are times when the words that form in my head to convey the feeling that is within is inadequate. There is no word to describe the intensity that I feel sometimes, or the conflict and harmony that exist together at the same time.

And that’s where the music comes in. It expresses what the words cannot. Like right now, when my heart is filled with many different feelings and thoughts; forlorn over certain things, thankfulness over others, a bit of regret, a bit of joy, a bucket load of remorse, a dash of hope. Hard as I try to put it in words, there is no describing it.

I began to understand how not just music, but also song, dance and any sort of art help people complete the expression that’s in their heart. Why some people naturally burst out in song or dance, play the guitar, paint, draw, so simply just hum. There are verses, there are choruses, there are variations and there are bridges. There is form and pattern in art, yet it’s not robotic or clinical. It’s fluid, natural and organic. Like our bodies, our souls, our lives.

There is nothing ground breaking is what I am saying here. Most people who haven’t stuck their heads in books, numbers, figures and charts (or aren’t engineers) like me would have figured that out long ago. Art, like music, song or dance is the projection of the heart that resides in us. To deny it is to deny our hearts, and to deny our hearts is to deny our lives.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival. ~ CS Lewis