On the Feeling of Standing a Foot off the Ground

In a 2009 post (Applying Principles, 363–65) titled “Life in Three-Quarter Time,” I wrote that the three-quarter time signature in music, especially as exhibited in the Viennese waltz, represents to me the “expression and symbol of effortless joy.”
 
In a variation on this theme, beyond the three-quarter time signature but still in music, I would like to talk about another feeling or emotion I have experienced in music called the feeling of standing a foot off the ground.
 
I first heard this expression when a professional trumpeter came to my junior high school and to the accompaniment of our band played “Come Back to Sorrento.” I was blown away, to say the least, by his seemingly effortless competence and the reverberations of his sound bouncing off the walls of the auditorium. I remember also that he said to us that when everything in a performance goes right, “you just feel like you’re standing a foot off the ground.” The expression can apply to listeners as well. I know I felt it after his performance.
 
A little later, in the summer of 1962, I attended a Stan Kenton clinic in Indiana. Kenton’s jazz band at the time was larger than most, with an extra four mellophonium players. The instrument, essentially, is a French horn straightened out to look and be played like a trumpet. The first night at the clinic, the Kenton band performed. The venue was packed with enthusiastic teenage wannabe jazz musicians. Yes, the band brought the house down, but the better expression, I am certain, is that everyone in the audience felt like he or she was standing a foot off the ground. The sound bounced off the walls urging us to lift ourselves above the floor!
 
This expression has remained with me all these many years. I have experienced the feeling a number of times, though not at every performance. Several factors are relevant for producing the experience. The appearance of effortlessness in the performers is important, because it usually produces a smile on my face along with a wonderment of “how can they do that”—and the emotion “I am so glad I am here to experience it.” A similarly appreciative and enthusiastic audience helps by vicarious sharing of the experience. And the venue matters, to enhance the resonance of the bouncing sounds—wood on the walls and ceilings being a big plus.
 
A recent experience my wife and I enjoyed was a performance of Gustav Mahler’s sixth symphony from behind the orchestra, high up and with only a few percussion players blocked from view by the hanging organ pipes. We felt like we were in the orchestra.
 
The venue was Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, a hall loaded with wood on its walls and ceilings. In its acoustic power the hall has been compared to the Musikverein, home of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Disney Hall did not disappoint, especially in this performance.* The effortless competence of the players was clearly in view along with their music stands in front of them—I could tell when it was time to repeat a section of the music when the players turned their music pages back to the beginning. We also enjoyed a full frontal view of the conductor (Gustavo Dudamel). All of these factors enhanced our enjoyment of the music and contributed to my feeling of standing a foot off the ground—actually, I was on the edge of my seat and wanted to stand, but did not for fear of blocking someone else’s view.
 
This feeling I am talking about agrees with what Ayn Rand has written (50–64) about music as an art form, namely that it appeals directly to our sense-of-life emotions, bypassing any conceptual identifications that may be involved in the experiencing of other arts. Sense of life, Rand states, is “a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics” (26) that can range from the benevolent and optimistic to the malevolent and pessimistic.
 
Without endorsing Ayn Rand’s hypothesis (57–62) that music lacks an objective vocabulary for esthetic judgment—musicologists do have something fairly extensive—I think she is correct in general that the esthetic tastes of listeners to the type of music I have described express similar senses of life as mine. Similar, but not the same. Emotional responses to music are general, not specific or literal. And, while our senses of life can vary in other parts of our lives, we nevertheless experience a positive feeling during these performances.
 
When I say that our responses to music are not specific or literal, I am, as Rand did, challenging the descriptive terms that have been used for works of music, such as “Tragic” for Mahler’s sixth symphony or “fate knocking at the door” as Beethoven supposedly described (or as was invented by his biographer) the first four chords of his fifth symphony. I did not hear anything tragic in Mahler’s symphony. I hear triumph, as I do in Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Interestingly, Mahler composed the work during a happy period of his life, and it is disputed whether he or someone else labeled it the tragic symphony, either when it was first performed or in later years. The name is for the emotion evoked in certain people, maybe Mahler, or in certain critics, audience listeners, or conductors. And “fate knocking at the door” was the emotion evoked in Beethoven (or his biographer), but not me.
 
By calling these musical responses “taste,” I mean that the physics of music cannot at present be connected with specific emotions we experience, which means what we feel is neither right nor wrong (Rand, 55–56). It further means that not everyone, probably not many, including my wife, would feel like standing a foot off the ground when listening to these particular pieces. My wife sometimes does feel like dancing around the room when listening to certain music! What musicians and musicologists have given us is a method or vocabulary for describing a well-composed and well-performed work of music. What it cannot yet do (perhaps never?—I don’t know) predict that this particular music will evoke that particular emotion. (Cf. “Classical Music Alters the Brain—Here’s How.”)
 
The feeling of standing a foot off the ground is, of course, metaphor, and represents a general feeling of joyous, maybe even ecstatic, pleasure. Musical performers, actors, and opera singers, even public speakers I have observed immediately after a particularly outstanding and appreciated performance seem to have a glow about them that says they are standing a foot off the ground.
 
Vicariously, I translate that feeling to my enjoyment of their performances.
 
To close this post, let me describe a different, but I think, similar emotion I experienced two days after President John F. Kennedy was killed. I was with a group of musicians in the lobby of a dormitory where we watched on a black-and-white television Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s second symphony, labeled The Resurrection. All of us present were still in shock, stunned by the assassination, but that performance was a salve or balm for our painful emotions. Indeed, I found it uplifting, as in “life goes on.” I did not, of course, experience anything religious, as arising from the dead, but I was inspired and moved to get on with my life despite the immediate calamity. Not quite the feeling of being a foot off the ground, but a profoundly positive feeling, urged and encouraged by compelling music to accomplish my values in life.**
 
 
* We have also sat in the last row of the balcony at Disney Hall and enjoyed every minute of the musical performance. The sound reaches every seat.
 
* Customarily, a requiem (by Brahms, say, or Verdi) or funeral march (such as the second movement of Beethoven’s third symphony) is played as a memorial to someone who has died. Bernstein, I think quite appropriately, chose the Mahler.