Essay: Hues of Consonance

​Hues of Consonance

By Richa Gupta
QuailBellMagazine.com

Musical tunes are like rainbows—precious, but painfully ephemeral. Regardless of how passionately we strive to embed the sight of the multicolored, harmonious arch beaming across the tapestry of the sky within our memory, or of how hard we endeavor to preserve the sound of a pleasurable melody in our minds for eternity, they inevitably dissipate into the sorry, scattered remnants characteristic of transitory wonders. 

Nature delights me; it has for years on end. And this is the reason I take to haunting it whenever my spirits are low and I feel melancholy seeping in through the crevices in my mind. But nature doesn’t evaporate my gloom as saffron sunlight does the sparkling waters of a pond—rather, it bestows upon my soul the precious strength to bear it. However, nature as a whole does not possess the power to do so—only its sound does.   

Nature’s elements comprise of music. The whistling of crisp air, the lapping of the gentle waves of gleaming ponds, the rustling of the leaves hanging from the skeletal branches of the towering trees, the humming of the bumblebees of they approach carmine petals… Although seemingly conflicting aural perceptions, they all conflate to create the joy of consonance. Every single sound gifted to humanity, from the shattering of the cascading rain on the telluric surfaces to the violent crashes of thunder conceived in the darkening heavens, houses its own, distinctive meaning and individual marvel. Music stems not only from the elegant, adroit movements of an artist’s fingers upon her instrument, but from every conspicuous wonder and every little interstice the sunlight caresses. Aural beauty does not solely take the form of the vibrating vocals of a chorister, but also of the terrestrial mechanisms governed by the sphere of nature. But pleasure never comes without pain—and in this case, we are impaled by the devastating sparseness and transience of these lilting cadences. Courtesy of uncontrolled urbanization, humanity has destroyed the music of Mother Earth along with herself, thereby rendering the globe devoid of the illumination of auricular harmonies. Now, we must seek respite in the inexorable humming of vehicles and throbbing mechanical contrivances that rid the earth of her intrinsic charm, and replace her bygone melodies with the clamor of manmade machinery. It’s sorrowful, but it’s reality. 
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But all hope isn’t lost. If upset about the paucity of natural, melodic beauty, simply conjure in your mind the fleeting rainbow which you will never be able to visualize in its entirety again. Reminisce on the circumstances that made this wonder possible—the soothing tones of the drizzling rain, the visual music of the golden orb peeking through the rifts in the overcast skies, the howling gales whose eerie chants merged to form perfection, the sounds of the creatures as they retreated to their hollows—and you will realize that humankind can never defeat nature, and certainly never avert the forces of the earth from fashioning the rainbow, an incarnation of euphony.

#Real #Music #Colors #NaturalBeauty #Elements

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