Apostasy?: someone recently asked me why I need to do music

I wasn’t able to give an answer beyond “ooh nice sound”

so i fell back to my cliched and slightly strange philosophy that the raison d’être of humanity is the pursuit of beauty. and fundamentally i think that is the bedrock right. from a personal perspective, i can’t live without it. i don’t think anyone will understand it but it feels like a blanket of comfort, a bubble into which i can escape. occasionally it gets boring, and that’s when i try my best to expand this bubble

but when i try and i fail, that’s when it starts to suck. because i suddenly realize that all i have is that bubble and i need that. and without it what is the point of life?

i’ve always wondered how death would feel like, the end of everything and just an eternity of nothingness. eternity doesn’t really capture it, because i think that when we die our sense of time does too, so eternity doesn’t really exist. but i’ve also realized that in my “void” there is one constant: some kind of sound, no matter how musical or stagnant, but it’s still a sound. and i think that’s the point but also the problem. im never really at peace because of this inescapable shadow following me everywhere.

right now, “white christmas” is playing in my head and here’s a case study: 1. im happy because it’s a nice tune

2. im annoyed cos it’s been playing on repeat for about 24 hours now

3. im annoyed because i’ve been trying to harmonize it creatively for the past 24 hours but im no jacob collier so its honestly getting really uncreative and boring

and this sort of encapsulates it within a drop of dew. it is at once beautiful, perfect, pure, unmolested, but it is also brittle, stagnant, homogenous, and boring. i try to upgrade my technical ability, but it’s so frustrating when you’re in the valley of the dunning kruger curve (which, btw, i found out recently is apparently grossly misrepresented).

so when rilke said “in the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. and look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must i write” (admittedly i copied this from my diary i did not just memorize this) and sidney says “fool”, says my muse to me “look in thy heart, and write.” i don’t quite get this. i look in my heart and it’s just the pursuit of beauty that drives me. no altruism other than to help everyone realize that “hey this is a nice sound can’t you fucking hear it” but the same problem remains. i know i need music but i don’t why. these roots aren’t anchored on anything more substantial than the ever-shifting quicksand of aesthetic. that is my point, but it gets boring after a while. and when the rain comes and the quicksand turns into a mire, it becomes even harder to take root, and what roots there are are eroded.

finally let me address the title. is this apostasy? maybe? i’m not renouncing this, just trying to find meaning beyond “ooh nice sound”. so if i can’t do it for myself, and i have no one in particular to do it for, then why do i do this? i think the secondary reason, and the one i struggle with the most, is teaching people to appreciate music, or more specifically, a 101 on how to go “ooh nice sound”. and if our (my?) raison d’être is really that, then surely there must be a way to show people what it is. and herein lies the final brick in the wall: how the hell do i explain to somebody that a sound is nice? this isn’t sex, most peoples brains don’t work this way.