Why music?

[Analogous]

One of the most calming things that societies have ever discovered is the lullaby. In almost every culture there has ever been, mothers have rocked and sung their babies to sleep.

A humbling point that a lullaby reveals is that it’s not necessarily the words of a song that make us feel more tranquil. The baby doesn’t understand what’s being said but the sound has its effect all the same. The baby is showing us that we are all tonal creatures long before we are creatures of understanding.

As adults, we grasp the significance of words of course, but there remains a sensory level which cuts through and affects far more than an argument or an idea ever could. The musician can, at points, trump anything the philosopher might tell us.

A short video…

And a couple of short articles on the neuroscience behind our love for music.

Why We Love Music

Researchers are discovering how music affects the brain, helping us to make sense of its real emotional and social power.

greatergood.berkeley.edu

Keep Your Brain Young with Music

Music can be medicine for your mind, with benefits from memory improvement to stress relief.

www.hopkinsmedicine.org

 

[Analogous]

In the same vein…(some thoughts on the subject from a few great minds that lived before us…)

A century after Nietzsche proclaimed with his nihilistic grandiosity that “without music life would be a mistake”and a century after Walt Whitman observed with his life-affirming soulfulness that music is the profoundest expression of nature, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997), having narrowly escaped death in a concentration camp, delivered a set of extraordinary lectures on moving beyond optimism and pessimism to find the deepest source of meaning.

In one of his lectures titled:Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (public library), Frankl speaks with passionate life-tested conviction to the two great pillars of aliveness that had helped him survive the Holocaust and that help so many of us, even in circumstances far less life-threatening, survive our lives — music and the natural world:

It is not only through our actions that we can give life meaning — insofar as we can answer life’s specific questions responsibly — we can fulfill the demands of existence not only as active agents but also as loving human beings: in our loving dedication to the beautiful, the great, the good. Should I perhaps try to explain for you with some hackneyed phrase how and why experiencing beauty can make life meaningful?

I prefer to confine myself to the following thought experiment: imagine that you are sitting in a concert hall and listening to your favorite symphony, and your favorite bars of the symphony resound in your ears, and you are so moved by the music that it sends shivers down your spine; and now imagine that it would be possible (something that is psychologically so impossible) for someone to ask you in this moment whether your life has meaning. I believe you would agree with me if I declared that in this case you would only be able to give one answer, and it would go something like: “It would have been worth it to have lived for this moment alone!”

 

[MIOM]

What an excellent post! Bookmarked!!!