– Hmmm, very interesting! But, let us get a handle on this, Mr. X, I say. If you imagine that you can hear some sort of music that neither your wife, nor anybody else, can hear—if what she tells me is true—can’t you recognise that there is a problem here we need to address? A not inconsiderable problem, perhaps? That may need professional help. When did you first note this, what you refer to as, music? Perhaps in your early adolescence, with the first stirrings of your sexuality?
– Balderdash, Doctor! It is only a problem insofar as she, and you it seems, construe my music as some sort of undesirable deviation from normality. As a problem to be solved. I, on the other hand, see it as a special grace from the Muse.
– Really! And when was the first time you heard this extraordinary sound?
– It’s just as if it happened yesterday. There I was, embroiled in the preparation of tax returns, when I heard a single note being played on a viola. Or on a violin. Just a single note on some stringed instrument or other being tuned by some unseen presence within the office. I searched high and low to find where this strange note was coming from. The only radio I had in the office was switched off. As I listened to it, the note gained depth and volume. My body seemed to melt and be absorbed into this note. Then, I suddenly realized that the note was coming from within my own flesh and bones, Doctor. As if sounding in some far distant place and, at the same time, in some cavern in the depths of my soul. That note lasted about a half hour according to my office clock. But it seemed to me to be without beginning or end.
– What happened then, after that half hour?
– Not a thing, Doctor. When the note faded away—or when I returned from paradise, to phrase it differently—everything was more or less the same as before I ever heard it. In the beginning, I thought—just as my wife still thinks—that my mind had been subject to some sort of aural illusion. A temporary blip created by a fatigued brain or pressure at work. But, how I longed for the return of that note that I felt would never return…
– Yet, this longing of yours appears to have been satisfied, by all accounts?
– It certainly was, Doctor. One week later, as I was walking to the dart station, that tax-return stress was a thing of the past. Yet, as I walked, I heard my music once again and it sounded even more beautiful than ever. But it was no longer just a single note. It took the form of a simple tune that I had never heard before. A product of the culture of some exotic clime, perhaps, with just a hint of Araby. But, to be honest with you, Doctor, no human culture could generate such beauty.
– Hmmm! And this music seemed to be coming from within yourself, you say? Music from the depths of your own soul, as you might phrase it?
There was hardly any need for me to intervene. For, it is clear from the animated features of Mr. X that he can hardly wait to tell his whole story. To make the full confession that does good to the soul. Like the bearer of some sensational tale who has just found his first sympathetic ear.
– At first, Doctor, I thought the music was coming from my stomach. That something I had eaten had upset my digestion, with this unexpected result. The couscous I had eaten in a Moroccan restaurant the previous day, for example. Although you would hardly expect such fare to generate stomach music. Internal thunder, maybe, but music? A little bit later, the music seemed to have moved to my spine. A little bit later again it seemed to be coming from my heart. Later again, all of my body was, well… a concert platform for this band…
– A band you say?
– A full orchestra, Doctor. I began to hear it more and more frequently. And at each successive performance, still more musical instruments joined in. A weird thought occurred to me, at that time. I told myself that maybe that music was within me since the very day I was born. But that its pure sound was muffled by my own ignorance and life’s discordant symphony. Anyhow, I hear it more and more often these days. And when I least expect it. In the pub, in the office, on the train, at home… And, a strange thing, no matter where this band is playing, only I can hear it, playing there, sounding deep inside me!
– And can you identify individual instruments in this inner music, as you describe it? Or, would you say that this “music” is played on instruments hitherto unknown?
– Not really, Doctor. As soon as I mentally label an instrument I hear—an Arabic flute, a Japanese koto, a medieval lute, a Scottish bagpipe, an Algerian reihab, an Indian sitar, uileann pipes — then the music itself contemptuously rejects that label. As if it was mocking my feeble efforts to reduce its incredible novelty to known human terms. And although the same basic tune is being played continually by this orchestra, or band, the infinite variations it plays on this theme, sometimes makes the latter well nigh unrecognisable…
As I listen to this long spiel from the mouth of Mr. X, I detect a classic case of schizophrenia encased in that conventional gray suit that faces me from the other side of my desk. Experience tells me clearly that the voices and mysterious messages that patients of his ilk report are in the same category as his strange “music.” But other practitioners of my profession will be certain to take a keen interest in my description of the unusual symptomatology of X’s neurosis. I continue to make rough notes in my jotter as Mr. X gives free rein to his stream of consciousness:
schizophrenia—interesting and unusual case
music instead of voices in his head
great paper for the next convention will make my name
Mentally composing the first paragraph of this putative paper, I ask X, somewhat diffidently:
– And do you detect the influence of the great composers on this “music?” a question to keep Mr. X feeding data into my recorder.
– As I‘ve told you, Doctor, this music is unlike anything that you or I have ever heard. And, believe me, I know what I’m talking about. For I’ve listened to the music of all the great composers: Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Delibes, Rimsky-Korsakov… all the way down to the moderns, like Philip Glass. I have researched the Ceòl Mór, the Great Music of the Scottish pipes, the classical ragas of India, the various musical traditions of Africa and their influence on the music of the Caribbean and the Americas. Trying frantically to gauge the origin of this music in my bones, I ransacked every musical tradition beneath the sun. From the Sean Nós of Connemara to the gríhe of the Berbers. From the rocks of Cape Verde to the deserts of Mongolia, I have listened to the traditional voice of seldom-heard peoples. From Joe Heaney to Benny Moré to Victor Jara to Lightnin’ Hopkins. And I know how to separate the grain from the chaff, the true voice from that of the phoney, Woodie Guthrie from Bob Dylan, for example. You would hardly believe, Doctor, the long nights I have spent till the dawn listening to recordings of every type of music on this planet. And this obsessive cosmopolitanism is nearly driving my wife out of her mind.
– Not surprisingly! And all of this study brought you no nearer to the root of your condition?
– My effort was all in vain, Doctor. For no music that I heard from whatever tradition came even close to the ethereal music that my orchestra plays… An eminent Professor in our National School of Music suggested to me that I learn musical notation. Knowing this musical alphabet, he said, I would be able to transcribe my music into a written form. And thus be in a position, maybe, to make a startling new innovation in world music. However, I discovered before long that the form of musical notation that is perfectly adequate to a description of classical European music, say, has no relevance whatsoever to the music that only I can hear. The pre-classical pentatonic scale is, likewise, unable to describe the music of my soul… But all of that was before I realised that I was a conductor, not a creator…