How do we share our thoughts? We can write down our famous chili recipe. We can pick up the phone and call mom. We can labor away for months to make a video with clever animation. Or, we can sing a tune. If I start to sing, unlike the other methods mentioned, a person near me can clap along with my warbling. A third person can hum a bass line and suddenly we are all making music together in real time. We are thinking our thoughts, sharing our immediate inspiration and hearing others think. Out of curiosity, a stranger stops to listen. The non-participant listener in our impromptu jam session hears what three other people are thinking simultaneously! Our thoughts become his thoughts. He may even add some music in his mind’s ear.

You can respond meaningfully to the shared musical thoughts of others while you are making music in parallel. This is more than a conversation. The sounding interactions overlap and the music makers respond even while the subject is constantly changing. This is as close as humans come to sharing a brain. With practice, the experience of making music together encourages deep listening and responding with sensitive musicality.

A brass quintet sits down in front of a small audience to perform an arrangement of a Bach prelude played originally by the composer at a pipe organ. Each member of the group is reading music and “singing” a single line by way of their brass instruments. The audience hears the thoughts of five individuals in real time. This is an astonishing thing. There’s nothing really like it with words. Five actors declaiming different monologues simultaneously cannot affect the audience in the same way. When we share our thoughts using words, we must do so one speaker at a time or many people speaking the same thing. But with music you can share your many layered thoughts with others and be “understood” even as you play or sing.

When the brass quintet plays Bach, we are not just hearing the performers thinking together. In a performance with written music, we are hearing the thoughts of the composer as well. Sometimes written compositions came out of improvisations like Bach preludes. Some three hundred years later, as the quintet plays, we are basically experiencing the near immediate musical thoughts of another man. Incredible!

We can share our musical thoughts without written music, of course. Sensitive performers can make music up on the spot which demands a very open mind and deep listening. It is satisfying to hear exceptional jazz musicians reacting to subtle shifts in rhythms and slight changes in musical gestures while they are improvising. Improvised musical “games” can be performed with various success. A general outline is given for the “game” and the participants work within those rules. (Of course, broadly speaking, that is an adequate description of all music…)

A few years ago, I heard a man in the grocery store who was a cataract of nonsensical whistling. As I tossed bananas and taco shells in my cart, he kept whistling on and on and on and on. His meandering musical expression was tuneless and persistent. At the time, I thought it was irritating; it was certainly nonsensical. Later, I learned that this kind of whistling is an early sign of dementia. His mind was loosening and the never-ending whistling was the symptom. In this case, I could literally hear the deterioration of the man’s mind.