The Mystery Of Our Inner Musicality

At the moment, I'm suffering from a serious inflammation of the tympanumm inside my left ear, which causes an almost 100% deafness of this ear. Of course, this is an unpleasant situation, especially for a musician, who has trained his acute hearing from his early childhood on. In such a situation, we notice, how we take it for granted to be able to hear and we seldom think about the fact, how important this sense is in our daily life. When the sense of hearing is missing, we are totally disoriented in a lot of situations, i.e. road traffic.

So, in this compulsory break, I was thinking about the question, which role our sense of hearing is playing for the musicality of a person. Where does musicality have its origin? "Of course in the ear!", most of us may say, "With the ear we recognize the Music and these impulses are routed to the brain by our nerves". Well, but this would mean as a reverse, that deaf people do not have any kind of musicality, because they don't have any imagination, what music is...Is this really so?

At least for me, this is not correct; even when I'm not listening to anything from outside, there's still music in me. The ability of my imagination gives me the possibility to create music just inside me and not only music, which I heard before, but also new, unknown music. Ergo there must be something inside us, some kind of a musical center, that gives us the ability to realize music a priori.

There is an interesting anecdote of Glenn Gould: As a little boy he was practising on the piano at his parent's home and he again and again failed to play a certain passage of a piano work. Over and over he tried but didn't succeed. Then finally the door was opened and the chamber-maid came in and obviously she wasn't taken with the playing of Little Glenn, because without caring about Glenn at the piano she switched on the vacuum cleaner. Glenn went on trying this accursed passage, although the sound of the vacuum cleaner was drowning out his playing on the piano. And suddenly he managed to play the passage so perfectly how he had intended it all the time before. Only his imagination was his "ear" and obviously it was a better adviser than his normal ear.

Another example is the famous female drummer Evelyn Glennie, who has been nearly deaf since her early childhood but has become a leading figure on her instrument. She realizes music mainly only as vibrations but she is also able to compose! In this case one could object: "Well in this case there is not only the "inner musicality" working! At least she has a sensuous experience, because of the sound waves of her instrument...", but anyway, it is astonishing, that she, without hearing, has become a master on her instrument.

I'm sure, that there exists another sense inside us, which hasn't been discovered by scientists so far, and which is responsible for the phenomenon of our musicality. One of the many unsolved mysteries of mankind! One can be anxious to see, if the scientists will ever succeed to provide evidence to this 6th sense. But perhaps it would be better, if they won't, because exactly this mystery makes music being something so fascinating and beautiful. Who knows, perhaps their scientific curiosity would destroy this beauty...?!!