By Vijay Phanshikar :
 
“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the spaces between notes and curl my back to loneliness.
In my rented room (cooking privileges down the hall), I would play a record, then put my arms around the shoulders of the song. As we danced, glued together, I would nuzzle into its neck, kissing the skin, and rubbing its cheek with my own. ...”
-  Maya Angelou (1928-2014),
Waitress, singer, actress, 
dancer, activist, editor, 
film-maker, mother and poet, 
at the start of 1st chapter 
of the third part of her 
seven-volume autobiography, titled
“Singin’ and Swingin’ and 
Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas”,
VMC, first published in 1976, Paperback 
 
 
 Prose  

MUSIC is like that -- evoking extremely personal emotion, inviting private responses, eliciting absolutely under-the-wraps reactions ! For an extremely sensitive soul like Maya Angelou, the relationship with music had many forms. For her, as it has been for countless others, music was very physical as well. She could slip into the spaces between notes and curl her back to loneliness. Multitudes of seekers of music would have a similar experience. That is the universal appeal of music -- a reason of its eternality (of human connect).

 

Maya lived life in extremes -- of suffering and success, of abuse and admiration so profuse that she would not know how to absorb its waves. Through all that tumult -- negative and positive -- music was her cohort, her private refuge, her personal sanctuary of happiness. In music she sought a warmth that was only her very own. She would put her arms around a song’s shoulders, and rub its cheek with her own. Though the quality of this experience is universal, common people may not respond to music similarly. One has to be an extraordinary mortal to develop such a keen closeness with music.

 

For, to understand the impact of music -- or song -- in such a manner, one has to develop an extremely sensitive and permeable skin. In other words, one has to allow one’s own mind to be extremely responsive to the lightest and the faintest of emotional nuances that keep dancing in one’s inner sanctum. Many singers -- classical or otherwise -- are known to have evolved a relationship with music based on an extremely fine and sensitive mind. Not only do they create music -- vocal or instrumental or classical or folk or popular -- but also learn unconsciously to treat music as a person(ality). So, they hug music, they kiss its skin, push their nose into music’s neck, smell its warm fragrance, caress its back and hair ... and get caressed by its notes in return.

 

So, whenever a soul as sensitive as Maya Angelou describes her relationship with music in many, many ways, she is not writing poetry to earn applause, but is expressing her soul’s inner vibes generated from her connect with music -- in whatever form. In Indian classical forms, the creator’s relationship with music is of a different order, as almost as close. This relationship is -- as if -- between god and devotee. In Indian thought, music is a form of Shabda-Brahma -- a phonetic expression of Om-kaar. No matter this fine difference, the universality of human relationship with music cannot be denied -- which Maya Angelou expresses in her unique manner. Her words have the power to appeal to every head and heart, her highly personal sentiment understandable to everybody.