We learn the chords are living things- Jimmy Webb

Any good songwriter will tell you the chords have a natural gravity to them, some will say that they seem to hold a dialogue with you through the music. They tell you what is coming next and they also tell you what is not coming next, when we play a chord that is incorrect in the sequence it screams at us, in fact all music does this, melodies, voicings of chords, and harmonies if they are wrong. I have found it  easy to understand this in music by adopting a sort of pseudo-animist perspective believing the song lives, or for me to breathe some life into the song in order to animate it and therefore to give it some form agency in the world.

Think about the impact the great songs have had some of them have spanned generations, others burn brightly for a short period of time then disappear. Often there is no logical reason why a song should last for so long because on the face of it, it is not clear or deep enough but music and the arts are not intellectual reasoning, and the reality of art and music as Carl Jung would put it is in the imaginal.

It is becoming obvious to many thinkers that this subliminal or imaginal world is real. Carl Jung believed that if you didn’t listen to what your unconscious has to say to you then it would actually become manifest in the material world often as a problem, may be an illness or psychological disturbance.

There are very interesting comparisons between the Jungian active imagination exercises and processes that artists go through in order to create a piece of work, even down to the fact that they are taken over for the piece of work to find its own way into the world.

This way of thinking is sadly absent from the education system that teaches such things as song writing but if songs have real agency and may have a way of changing things than this is an extraordinary powerful doorway to influence and something that we should bear that in mind. Even if you don’t believe in the efficacy of what I am saying even the ability to write better songs with this way of thinking should be reason enough to adopt some of those ideas.

So I suggest we conduct a thought experiment, speak to the notes of chords and allow the songs to rise from our minds unhindered from the strictures of the intellectual process. For those interested in the Jungian active imagination exercises have a listen to this podcast http://www.thisjungianlife.com/heres-the-podcast/ episode 13.

Vic

www.bluescampuk.co.uk just imagine what you could do with music