Diana Wichtel on the power of music to make us feel again

Joni Mitchell performed her first full-length concert in nearly two decades at the Newport Folk Festival last month. Photo / AP

Opinion

OPINION

Who? Doing what? Where? Joni Mitchell, apparently, performing a set at the Newport Folk Festival for the first time in around half a century. Joni Mitchell, performing at all. Click. She sat gazing magisterially into the expectant crowd, surrounded by musicians offering accompaniment and paying court. She sang Both Sides Now, her friend, singer Brandi Carlile, supplying gentle cues as needed. Oh my.

"Certainly, anyone who cared for her work was reduced to tears by the videos," Adam Gopnik wrote briskly in The New Yorker. It's a publication not known for public displays of emotion. Gopnik displayed his knowledge of her genius, her open tunings and "strange, original system of chording" but, when describing her Newport performance, he appeared to have something in his eye. "She was, throughout ... herself, racing through her matchless lovelorn lieder of the 70s, swooping and smiling as she sang."

Mitchell has had health challenges. She suffered a brain aneurysm in 2015. Before Covid, Carlile had organised jams at Mitchell's place, with the likes of Dolly Parton, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Chaka Khan, Mavis Staples … Oh my.

Is there anything, apart from grief, that can ambush you like a song? My children never let me do a family party playlist because of my buzzkill selection of droning masterpieces: Judy Collins singing The Beatles' In My Life, Nina Simone singing Jacques Brel's Ne Me Quitte Pas, Buffy Sainte-Marie singing Mitchell's The Circle Game. Anything by Leonard Cohen in later life, his voice dropped a couple of octaves as Mitchell's has, weighted down by the wear and tear of living, even as an icon.

What was so moving about Mitchell's performance? She's Canadian. She hasn't lived a celebrity life in the Hollywood manner. As the crowd went nuts and the musicians on stage with her wiped away tears after Both Sides Now, she laughed with delight and could be heard saying to herself, "Oh that's beautiful."

In a world that these days can make feeling numb seem like the wisest option, everyone was … feeling.

The power of music. It's sort of innate. During an interview about his book Musicophilia, neurologist Oliver Sacks talked about the subcortex, "The more primitive parts of the brain, which are a sort of treasure of implicit memory, where there's poetry or music or simply how to walk and talk and behave." He wrote about patients all but lost to dementia or severe brain injury, who would return to themselves when playing the piano or singing with perfect pitch and expression. The band still valiantly playing on deck as the ship goes down.

American philosopher Susanne Langer believed that music could do more than excavate the feelings a listener might have experienced. She wrote: "Just as words can describe events we have not witnessed … music can present emotions and moods we have not felt, passions we did not know before." That feeling of transcendence. It's a mystery.

Kate Bush is back in the charts for her 1985 song, Running Up That Hill. Around the world, and in Dunedin, people took to the streets to writhe in red to Bush's 1978 hit in celebration of The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever.

McCartney, 80, performed at Glastonbury this year, singing I've Got a Feeling with a virtual John Lennon, 42 years gone. Some may sneer but it was a year for finding you have something in your eye.

The Rolling Stones, Elton John, the Queen ... They won't quit because it is, you imagine, innate. It's just how they walk and talk and behave. You have to salute a sort of act of resistance, carrying on in defiance of the fashion of the day. Refashioning the fashion of the day.

After the aneurysm, Mitchell had to learn the guitar again. At Newport she stood and played a guitar solo on Just Like This Train. Before the concert she told CBS, "I've never been nervous about being in front of an audience, but I wanted it to be good." Mission accomplished. Rock on.

Next week: Steve Braunias