Elaine Miller
This I wrote in September 1999. After all this time, I still quite like it. I hope you do too. Really it should be "A piece entitled "Music", by Elaine Miller"
Music by Elaine Miller.
Now, you have to bear in mind that I don’t have any formal training in music. Music, I left behind in high-school concert band, along with my trombone, case and little bottle of “slide oil”. I have a ghost of theory still in my head, a memory of slide positions and half-notes and the bass clef being different than the treble clef…. But then I also have a memory of emptying my spit-valve on the sax players for fun, high-school humor being what it is and all. Just as the trumpet players wadded up sheet music and dropped it down the tuba’s cavernous throat. Just as the bass drum player used to yank out our tuning slides from behind as we played, making a little round red mark where the instrument squashed into our lips, and leaving us blowing a dismal honking out the open tube by our ears.
At that juvenile level of learning, you didn’t get the words yet, even if the span of time since graduation hasn’t faded them to quietude. You know forte and pianissimo, allegro and adagio, and so “loud soft fast slow” are about all the words given you, and to hell with poetry. Watch the guy at the front of class waving the little stick.
Without special words, we can’t easily convey a whole thought or feeling. Try discussing the fine details of engineering using Dick and Jane primer words. Try writing a recipe without using “bake” “saute” “al dente” or the like. Try asking a novice to hand you a specific tool in the woodshop and you run into an illustration of what I’m trying to say here: ease of communication depends on a shared language. Whatever the language. And I’m telling you that I don’t have the language for music.
So I’m going to talk about some music I heard.
~~~~~~~
I’m standing in an underground parking lot in one of the worst sections in town at three AM. Tears are trickling from the corners of my eyes, falling barely noticed. She stands, facing away from me, some distance away, arms at her sides. Her eyes are closed, her head tilted back. She’s singing. I’m listening with each of my two ears -- and wishing for more ears. She’s letting me be there, you see.
Her voice sounds like the best afterglow you ever had, reminiscent of your lover’s voice, rich and deep and satiated, murmuring sweet nothings in your ear as you both drift to sleep.
Her voice is like the good side of the difference between looking at a life-size photograph of your soul-mate, and actually holding that person in your arms. It speaks to you from heart, mind and body. It has more than the standard-issue number of dimensions. Others’ songs are now missing something, to your ear.
It started when we first met, or thereabouts. She went outside my house to smoke, a common enough occurrence. I was puttering my non-smoking self around inside the house, when I heard a snatch of tune from outside. Curious, I opened my door and stepped out. She was propped up against the wall, cigarette in hand, eyes focussed far away, in mid-song. I must have made some noise, because she stopped short, looked embarrassed, and scuffled her feet in the grass. I took the hint, and from then on, when she smoked outside my house, I merely opened the window to let the song in.
Her voice sounds like too much that power for a human throat. It sounds like it has a life of its own and needs a strong container. Good thing it has one.
Her voice, with a throb in it, sounds like all the wrong that can be done to a little girl, and all the pain that little girl feels. Then, suddenly, it sounds like a angry journey half-made, and like a coming reckoning.
She told me about how her family had gotten together in that Roman-Catholic old-country family kinda way, and heckled her into shame, into hiding her gift. Good Catholic girls, after all, don’t pursue a career in music. They told her she sounded awful, put their hands over their ears, bade her stop the racket. They used the tools of manipulation and mockery to smother her songs for years.
She’s working on it nowadays, she said, but she still is a little shy.
Her voice is clean and pure and innocent, like an audible interpretation of a fairy’s aerial flirtation with a butterfly. No burrs, no hitches -- and effortless soaring.
Her voice sounds like an alley cat in heat, smoky and hot, purring and oh-so-knowing.
Nowadays, I am often gifted with her sound, her songs. And when she switches from singing someone else’s song, to crafting her own, I can’t tell the difference in quality between the song that made a million dollars and the one that no-one but me has ever, ever heard. Except I know which one makes me cry.
Her voice is jazz. No, it is blues. No, rock. Perhaps hip-hop. I’ve heard it be pop, and sometimes country. I think I just ran out of labels, but she hasn’t yet run out of voices.
Her voice belongs to no gender, and she is a young man with a sexy rasp and roguish character, then a young woman with her own purity of tone and passion. Sometimes she sings duets with herself, and I have to come back over and over to count the people singing. One. One. One.
As I said, I was standing in this underground parking lot a while back. Listening, and wiping my eyes a bit, and watching with a fraction of my attention for any of the night-denizens of this part of the city. This was the first time she’d given me this gift. After months and months of being my lover, she let me into another part of her soul. I didn’t have to pretend to be preoccupied, I didn’t have to sit on the other side of an open window. I could just stand and hear her singing, sound echoing from wall to wall of this huge empty concrete shell. She played with it -- her voice, her songs, the echo. Unmoving -- but dancing with her sound as a dancer whirls a silky veil about like a flame.
I didn’t know exactly why I cried, or why I sometimes still do.
Maybe knowing her sensitive self as I do, I cry for knowing how much she trusts me. Maybe it’s for the talent delayed some years, but not buried, by old-world religious morals. Maybe it’s for the girl who could have used the joy of her music to sustain her through some hard times, back when. Maybe it’s just a sense of recognition of the life in her music. Even if I don’t have the words.
