David Singleton

Music and the Present Moment, David Singleton, June 2020.

WE sit at the piano and slowly play a repeated three-note arpeggio. For the musically minded, it might start on the dominant. It might be in c# minor. In my mind, I am playing Beethoven's moonlight sonata, but it can be any piece of music. To play an instrument is to leap aboard a teleporter to another realm. An experience that is not unique to the performer. Listening to a piece of music you love has the same effect. Where are you? When are you? Who are you? The questions gloriously irrelevant. While fully engaged with music, we cannot 'think'. To ask "who am l?" Or "when am I?" would mean removing our attention from the music and back into a different place. But let us imagine that we can. Who am I? AM I me, or am I Beethoven. Am I playing Beethoven or is he playing me? When I first heard the Beatles recordings, it was not them singing, but me. Such is the power of the universal voice. Likewise, "when am I?". Is it today (June 2020), is it the 1960s, when the Beatles sung their hits, or 1762 when a grumpy, perhaps hungover Beethoven strolled over to his piano, strolled through some arpeggios and changed our worlds. I would suggest that it is all of the above. When we are engaged with music we are outside of time, we are part of an ongoing present moment that encompasses all of the above. We are also outside of self - and part of an ongoing consciousness.

But the glorious thing is that we cannot know this. Because when we are engaged with music we cannot 'know' anything.