Essays that Worked!
Evan Studwell '13
Brunswick High School, Brunswick, ME
It’s Sunday morning. I’m seven years old. I rub my eyes and shuffle downstairs towards the living room. Upon realizing the immediate effects of a soft couch on my tired body, I close my eyes for a minute and think. I think it’s a good day for a movie. My eyes dart towards the television set. Jumping from the couch and crouching in front of the stack of Disney movies I run my fingers over the smooth bindings searching for the perfect one. I stop at "Fantasia." I fast forward through the boring introductions and instrumental silliness to get to the good parts, the animations. How can such vivid images and colors flow mellifluously in front of me? Intricate and interesting structures blaze to and fro in front of my eyes. I see the pictures. I hear the music. What does it all mean?
It’s Sunday morning. I’m seventeen years old. My eyes crack open. My mind immediately begins to calculate the day’s events. Realizing my homework is already done, relief floods my mind, and it’s time for a movie. Somehow I remember that we own the film Fantasia. Finding the movie behind the television console, covered with dust, I plug it in. My ears fill with music, delicate dolce, bold marcatto, and leisurely allargando. I feel the music, breathe the music, and become the music. Preoccupied with my own thoughts, I lie on my back and stare blankly at the ceiling, listening. I can’t see the pictures. I am the music. What does it all mean?
Science provides a structure. To me, the world is unsatisfying when I am not able to explain something scientifically, no matter how complex the explanation. For example, when I cannot explain the way hydrogen peroxide cleans wounds, I look to science to explain it. Scientific study is the progression from hypothesis to discovery. It is a mathematical experiment that stimulates the same senses that make me appreciate music. Fantasia, therefore, is to me a scientific study on the effects of music on the emotional psyche, which is what got me interested at age seven and keeps me interested at age seventeen. As a child, I didn’t care about the subtleties of sound or musical instructions of the conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Fantasia was about the funny animated characters, and the beautifully colored landscapes they traipsed about on. Now, I watch the movie for the music. It spins around the air, creating torrents of sound. I can close my eyes and touch the harmonic chords, feel the sforzando-piano crescendos. When I hear music, I see an image. It might be an image of landscape, or just flowing colors. Music uses sound to create an image. The image becomes an emotion, and the generalized emotion is translated into a specific feeling. For me, a feeling in music is entirely different from emotion. Beethoven’s 5th evokes a feeling of solitude which then settles into bliss. The distillation of an image to an emotion to a particular feeling characterizes the pattern in music that makes it so pleasing to listen to. This is the science of music. It may be a performing art, but it is also a scientifically grounded study of human emotion.
It has become clear to me that from the day I first saw those “hours dancing” in Fantasia to today when I listen to Pavarotti perform Nessun Dorma while writing this essay, music as a science has shaped my life. The science of music has molded my intrigue from a dim interest to a bright, lucid feeling. The sequence of music that first begins as sound, then progresses to an image, and finally a clear emotion, parallels the scientific process of inquiry. The remarkable interconnection between music and science has taken me ten years to appreciate.
Last Modified: Monday, July 27, 2009 13:44