Music, Magic and Mystery: When I forget who I am, music always finds me again.

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:01:09 +0100

Music has always been an important part of my life. My whole family is musical, and music always transported me to a deep, sacred place in my psyche. Music and nature were the two key influences in my development. I grew up in beautiful semi-wilderness country in Muskoka, Ontario, with imaginative, creative parents who wove magic into my life with their unique values and passions. Night-time walks with Dad out through the “Dark Bush” (where you might see pairs of glowing eyes out of the corner of your eye!) to the neighbouring farm where the “fairy lanterns” flashed in the grasses – these walks were shrouded in the same trembling mystery as the recordings of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion we would listen to around the dining room table. My days were filled with imagination, reverence and a deep, deep connection to something larger than myself, something larger even than all of humanity.

Then I went to high school, and later moved to the city to study science. Land became a human commodity divided into squares and rectangles, fairy lanterns became mating fireflies and music became a combination of vibrations of varying frequencies. My childhood mystery became childish fantasy. Somehow, in all this learning, I lost my magic. Then, in my second year of University, my friends took me to hear Bach’s Double Violin Concerto at the Faculty of Music. To my surprise, when the music hit me something inside me melted and my face flooded with tears of loss I did not understand.

I gradually came to realize that in attempting to "fit in" to society, in attempting to understand the world the way I perceived "normal" people did, I had closed the door to a deep part my being that was not childhood fantasy at all but the very stuff of life, the very essence of me. Now I understand consciously that music is forever a part of me.
My primary purpose in this life is to live and work from the place inside me where the music comes from – that sacred place where magic, imagination, beauty, ugliness, pain and pleasure all find their belonging. The fireflies and the fairies, the commodity-land and the mystery-land, the art and the science within music - These are all things of wonder and creativity when they reside in this place.

The art of song gives its performers the power to communicate from that place, even when no words can express it. The act of raising one’s voice in song is to me one of the most profoundly honest and vulnerable forms of self-expression. It is the art of communication broken down to one of its simplest, uncluttered forms. It is the straightforward telling of a tale, to quote my late mother’s favourite book, Duncton Wood, “From my heart to your heart.”

I don't even remember who the young musicians were in that noon hour performance of Bach's Concerto for Two Violins. They probably have no idea what a profound effect they had on my life. But each time I perform, every time I teach, every time I play with my music, I hope I can touch at least one heart as those musicians touched mine, help one sleeping soul wake up again to its own sweet, mysterious, magical music.

- Amy Dodington, 29th January, 2012

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Music, Magic and Mystery: When I forget who I am, music always finds me again.