Listening Away

I have an album of Brazilian music spinning through my iTunes, the suggestion of my friend D, part of a huge list of stuff he was kind enough to compile to help me get ready for my visit to his country.  I'm just sitting here listening to it grinning.  It's so good.  I can only catch about every fifth or sixth word because it's a cognate with Spanish, but I can't stop the smile.  I love the sound of the music, and I love the sound of the Portuguese.

I have loved Portuguese since I heard it for the first time, maybe even more than Spanish.  Whenever I used to hear my beautiful friend P the pianist speak it with my lost friend A, I would just sit back and let the sound of it wash over me like a gorgeous stream.  I've never had a chance to study it, but I've wanted to for years.  I love Spanish for the music in it. It's a good language to be happy and angry in.  It's a good language to talk to myself in when I'm working on something.  Portuguese has that same lovely music in it and a little something else.  I don't know how to describe it. I'm not sure what I'd use it for.  I'd need to know it a little better to know its character more.  I'd like to have them both.

Every language has something it does fantastically well.  Japanese, for example, is great for uncomfortable conversations and situations.  You get linguistically distant, stay vague, remain ultra-polite, give circuitous and face-saving non-answers which really are answers, and maintain a level of pragmatic protocol and hierarchy that gives you something to keep your mind busy while you worry and look for a chance to dart out the door.  Perfect.

The languages a country speaks, both its spoken words and what it makes with its instruments, tell so much about what to expect from it.  I love to hear as much of both as I can when I'm going into a place.  I like to know the old stuff as well as the new.  The traditional music tells what the place is at its deepest heart, what it has come from, what it is when nobody is looking.  The new artists or new takes on the old forms are also great to see because they show how the culture wants to be seen, how perceptions are changing, how that which was is either remaining, dying away, or, in some cases, coming full circle again.  Don't even get me started on what I can pull out of a culture by their words.  It's the same sort of thing all over again.

I could spend a very happy life going from place to place and doing nothing but studying language and music, looking and how the two match up (or don't).  I wonder if there's a job out there that does that.  I'm betting not, but isn't it a great idea?  Somebody should TOTALLY pay me to do that.  Get on that, people with money.  I'm counting on you.  In the meantime, though, this album is really great, and I need to turn my attention back to it a little more closely before bedtime comes and clubs me over the head for the evening.