Consider the following analogy: Music is the harmony of the human soul expressed in sound and, as the saying goes, “Music soothes the savage beast”. At an early age (some say before birth), human beings respond to music, matching the beats of their hearts to those of the music. People sometimes miss the aesthetic harmony in other things (a beautiful building, a delicious meal) because they’re distracted by their practical applications: an ugly house is just as easy to live in as in a beautiful one; a bland and tasteless meal satisfies hunger no differently than a delicious one. Music is different. It has no real practical value except the harmony it radiates and the creative expression of its author. Humans have the urge to create and respond to the creation around them.
Sometimes the beauty of music leads the listener to find harmony in the creations around them; the skill to appreciate the complex harmonies of music can lead to an appreciation of complex and hidden harmonies in life. An appreciation of how seemingly disconnected chords melt together into a majestic musical creation can help you recognize that the triumphs of tomorrow that are hidden behind the difficulties of today. Continuing this analogy, we all participate in the performance of the Orchestra of Life both as performers and audience! We yearn to create a wonderful melody, but it takes time and discipline to acquire our musical skills. We start playing, but miss the beat, play out of tune, hit the wrong notes, overpower someone else’s part, or, most often, give up playing altogether, thinking we don’t have any talent! When several billion of us play this way, it sounds terrible and deafens us. Welcome to our world! We spend most of our lives blaming the “musicians” around us or the Conductor (our higher power, whatever that may be!). We try out different instruments, parts and tunes to bring harmony to our lives and to find that wonderful melody we were born to create. Unfortunately, the final curtain often falls too soon, and the sound of our music is silenced before we’re ready, leaving our ears reverberating with a meaningless cacophony instead of a triumphant and powerful last chord.
This is not the way things are supposed to be. In our view, learning to approach reality as we do music can help us lead our lives beautifully. We are much more talented at bringing disparate tunes together than we give ourselves credit for! Our peaks and valleys, our ups and downs—all these become part of the masterpiece and become a work of art that is incredibly satisfying to listen to, despite the difficulty of performing it.
And this is the central idea of our album! In creating it, we hope to take you through some of the stages in the Harmony of Life, a life beautifully lived. Initial album’s name, “Primary Elements”, was chosen to set the stage for the kinds of songs that show the cycles of humans experience. The second album, “The Elements of Love” follows the same concept. Albums’ layout uses the ancient oriental concept of the Five Elements to organize songs within the album to be one continuous flow, similar to the seasons of the year. You’ll want to listen to this album as one music piece, like a book, with each song a chapter. If you throw one of the chapters away, the book won’t make much sense. We think you’ll see that these songs portray the different seasons of life that we humans live as we pass through them.
Each turn of our existence, when thoughtfully lived, leaves the only traces worth noticing: the Music created by all of us. Welcome to the “Six Elements”!