I was skimming through The Golden Globe videos yesterdays when I found out that Ennio Morricone won the award in the Best Original Score category this year. The name Ennio Morricone is a familiar one to me. I have listened to his music before and I remember loving it. My experience after listening to it again yesterday was something what I can only describe as surreal. That is the reason I am jotting down my thoughts here.
Here is some background for the context. I am a 30 year male living in California, happily married and employed. I was in India until I was 21, moved to US for my graduate studies to the state of Massachusetts. Yesterday was nothing more than a typical sunday evening for me; I was happily tucked in our apartment.
Here is the youtube link of the music I listened to yesterday, if you are interested.
When I started listening to the music, I felt chilly suddenly; as if I was thrown into cold winter outdoors of Massachusetts from the warm setup of our California apartment. My anxiety levels spiked up. I could sense it in the pace of my heartbeat, steps and words. Then at around 05:30 into the video, when the “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” theme started to play, I felt completely different again. I was much more joyful. I felt myself sensing the fresh and earthy smell of the rain, if you can believe it. I am still stuck in my apartment, physically atleast, mind you!
Then began my train of thoughts, trying to make sense of this strange experience. “Why did I feel what I felt at that moment is hard to grasp in the context of the present conditions — the ambience I was in and the music I was listening at the moment.What if you thrown in past conditions as well into the mix, would that shed some light to my experience.”
I had two prior encounters with Ennio Morricone’s music; Both are very intense and surprisingly short lived experiences. The first one was when I watched “The Good, The Bad, The Ugly’’ movie for the first time. I was a teenager back then. I do remember the day vividly, though, it was a happy day as my school was shut down due to heavy rains. Spellbound by the music, I vowed to myself that I would love Morricone and listen to him every single day for the rest of the my life. “Rest of your life, really?” you may ask.Thats how much I got psyched up by it.
The second one was was much more interesting time for me. It was during the winter of 2008 in the middle of financial meltdown and I was just let go of my job. As you can imagine, it was quite an anxious time for me. I had all the free time in the world though. I decided to watch the “IMDB top 250 films of all time”. I covered all three movies in “The Dollars Trilogy” back to back. I was completely awe struck by all three movies and more so by the background score. With a cold and silent winter backdrop, the music, with a strong support of caffeine in my body, took me to a trans state. I found myself giving standing ovation to the music in my mind. I became addicted to the album.
See when we take these two previous encounters and reverse engineer to explain how I felt, it seems simple enough.
I do not claim to understand the relation between music & emotion but I can atleast intuitively appreciate how my present mood is elevated/changed based on the music I am listening to. I have always thought that when a group of people with different backgrounds (past conditions) who are more or less in the same mood (present conditions) listen to same set of music, everyone experience will be somewhat similar to each other with varied elevation levels.
But I have never thought that their backgrounds (past conditions) will be a factor to whether they are experience joy, sorrow or some other emotion. That to me is more or less news. When you take the relation between music & emotion, and throw memory as another parameter, this is beyond comprehension for me. For this to work, when you are listening to music, our brain not only need to respond to the music but, simultaneously, has to go and fetch all the relevant past experiences it has stored and associated with the music being at play.
What can a human brain actually do. It is unbelievably fascinating and frankly, a bit scary as well.