Hello Brave Souls!
Came out of yesterday's Oracle Sound Temple workshop with one word stuck on repeat: Echolalia. Feels like the name of a sound project, a band, maybe an album. When I say it out loud I hear chanting, verses repeating, something turning and churning like a water wheel. Stability built out of repetition. Maybe even immortality.
That thought led straight to a stranger one. Can music die?
I've been listening to Victor Wooten's audiobook, The Spirit of Music, and in it he retells a dream where Music herself spoke to him and said she was dying. That line struck a chord in my soul, no pun intended, and I haven't been able to shake it since.
Sitting with both of these together, here's where I landed. A water wheel doesn't move forward and vanish, it comes back around to the same position, and that return is exactly what generates the power. Echolalia, in the sense I mean it, is the mechanism that keeps something alive by bringing it back around, again and again, in a slightly new voice each time, not empty repetition for its own sake.
That's the actual answer to whether music can die. Not if enough people keep singing it back. The dying in Victor Wooten's dream isn't a fixed ending, it's a condition. It depends on whether anyone keeps turning the wheel. (Much like Yaima’s song, Mother.)
“To now be handed all the reins
of ages left behind,
choose to work in honor
of the ones who’ve yet to come
for when their tiny feet meet
the earth’s golden shore,
they will return the honor
and sing her song once more.
”