knowledge in sound
In painting, we destroy the pretty white of the canvas so that we could colour it to our heart's demand. There is no ugliness in the pure white shade of the canvas, but a painter's will is to cover it with something other than white. The emptiness of the canvas is unsettling to our eyes, for nothing in nature is truly as white as the lack of colour. To paint is then to bring the unnatural in a state of naturality, in other words in a state of beauty. It is the desire to fight that which goes against the very tangible harmony of life that connects us and every other being to Mother Earth, for this harmony is the essence of our lives in itself.
In music, we disturb the suffocating, yet perfect, quietness of an empty room with sound, so that the walls resonate to our heart's content. The unnatural stillness of a space where the highest frequency is that of our minds is also unsettling and, just like in painting, we seek to cover the already beautiful silence with music that makes the ever blank walls seem less unnatural than they are.
Music brings the colours on the canvas to life and the still image becomes a film of our memories. In the same manner, we can notice how colour on a canvas makes the vibration of sound tell a story.
Then, it is simple to see how art is essential to tradition and how honouring our ways of life is the basis for art. We celebrate nature by imitating it through music, painting, dancing, fighting and artistry as to never lose our bonding harmony to our world. As such, music is a sacred practice in educating ourselves and those around us and it is a sacred practice in preserving our traditions, for part of our traditions is our music itself.
To date a "history" of music is a ludicrous and wishful task as music is far older than time. Even before my oldest ancestors, the Dacians, lived in the lands that my people inhabit today, art was already a sacred celebration of life met and, to this day, still rediscovered in Europe. The knowledge kept in our ancestrial traditions has its roots far before any written word had ever been carved into stone, far into the past when oaks in Europe challenged even the clouds in height and when top of mountains were ever frozen. Before even the first string instrument was ever played, our languages and way of life have been preserved through tradition and as such through art. All of it with one purpose: to celebrate nature and its infinite beauty as to learn from it and as to honour those whom had to live before for us to be here. Hundreds of thousands years later, we still commemorate life through art just in the same way we once did long ago.
Music, like painting, is a concept known to man far even before the days of yore, but what that music sounded like to us, modern men, will forever be a mystery and a remider of how much knowledge we have lost and of how much beauty has been created before us. One thing is certain and that is that the sacred practice of singing and creating music cannot be dated in time as it does not pertain to time, but only to the memories of our souls.