“The truth is that musicality is as given as fingers and toes”

My favourite writer in music is W.A. Mathieu. Also a writer OF music and a philosopher and a powerful thinker.

“The truth is that musicality is as given as fingers and toes… It is a way of being awake, an angle of perception…”

Yes!!!!

It fascinates me that humans are so quick to believe they aren’t musical, when the existence of a non musical human is literally impossible.

We are vibrations and frequencies, with a tempo driven by a repetitious pulse, with a voice that creates melody every time it is intoned.

Nothing about the human experiences isn’t musical. We are musical every day, every moment.

When our brain perceives melody our limbic system becomes active. When our brain perceives rhythm our motor cortex becomes active, when we sing-song our right hemisphere fires up and when we use our voice our left hemisphere fires up.

All of these musical processes lead to heaps of neural activity which makes it easier for us to express, integrate, process, sense, release, emote, evaluate, analyse and more.

Our brain is a musical organ, and no matter what, we can’t not be musical.

The musical standard we hold ourselves to when we identify as non-musical is akin to the beauty standard. ‘Someone’ says it exists, and then we all measure ourselves against it and unless we are one of ‘the few’ we will always fall short in our own minds. Telling ourselves we aren’t it.

(Unless of course you are Janis Joplin who famously said to Leonard Cohen “never mind, we are ugly, but we have the music.” )

External standards are not reality, they are a cultural norm.

And music standards are exactly the same.

You are musical. We are all musical.

You deserve to use your voice, to express yourself with music, to dance and play with confidence and to ditch the ‘in tune vs out of tune’ myth.

Your brain needs your musicality to function! It’s as simple as that.