Across the world’s seven continents and among its eight billion inhabitants, every creation story bears the same themes of void, force, and formation. The ancestries differ, the myths diverge, but the trilogy is forged on the same anvil of chaos-creation-calm. At the dusk of creation, even before the creative heat simmered, cackling, chirping, meowing, and rustling combined with the sploshing of water to sing the first music into man’s ears.
Except for their unequal distances from man, the sun and music radiate unseeable influence, like the breeze, unsighted but unmistakable; the big fireball burning 150 million kilometres up in the sky, music transporting the mind beyond bliss, and the coolant breeze tranquilising body, soul and nature.
You and I have heard a million definitions of music. In faraway England, on Twelfth Night, a profound writer did shake the world with a spear and proclaimed music the “food of love”. Across the Atlantic, another songbird in Uncle Sam’s land described music as “love in search of a word”.
I am not a messiah seeking to abolish the concepts of music; I have only come to simplify its universality and discuss Jùjú, a Yoruba music genre. For all its vocal and auditory resonance, the universality of music does not solely lie in instrumentation or tonality or philosophy: It ultimately resides in do-re-mi. This is the universal language of music. Whether you are in the cold of the West or you are in the sun of Africa, whether you sing in Yoruba, Mandarin, Arabic or English, inasmuch as you have a discerning head with as much a brain as the size of a grain, you must understand do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do to truly appreciate music.
