“Music is the soundtrack of your life.”
Music is a form of emotions. In our youth listening to music helps us to remind specific people we have forgotten, to recall us specific events and helps us revisit specific important periods of our lives. Music doesn’t only evoke memories; it makes us feel a whole range of emotions. We’re extremely picky, not just about what music we listen to, but also about when we do so. At some point, we want to hear sad music and at other time, we want to hear music with full of life. We are highly emotional beings, but – strikingly – not all of our emotions make their way fully and properly to the front of our conscious attention when they need to. They’re there, but only in a latent, muted, undeveloped way. There’s too much noise both externally and internally: we’re under pressure at work; there’s a lot to be done at home; the news is on; we’re catching up with friends. We may be storing up the ingredients for a range of profound and potentially very important emotions: the raw matter of grief, sorrow, a sense of tender generosity towards humanity in general, a quiet sense of the beauty of modesty or pity for ourselves – for all the errors we didn’t mean to make, all the ways we’ve wasted our own best potential and didn’t properly return love when it was offered… These feelings and many others are the emotional containers of profound wisdom. Specific pieces of music give strength and support to valuable but tentative emotional dispositions. A euphoric song amplifies the faint, but ecstatic feeling that we could love everyone and find true delight in being alive; things that felt out of reach seem nearer; there’s so much that could be achieved. Day to day, these feelings exist, but are buried by the pressure to be limited, cautious and reserved. Now the song pushes them forward and gives them confidence; it provides the space in which they can grow; and given this encouragement, we can – as we should – take them more seriously and give them a bigger place in our lives. In our relationship to music, we’re seeking the right soundtrack for our lives. A soundtrack in a film helps accord the due emotional resonance to a specific scene. It helps us register the actual pathos of a situation that might be missed if we relied on words and images alone; it helps us fully recognize the identity of a moment. Exactly the same is true in our lives: we’re constantly faced with situations where something significant is going on; at the back of our minds, the helpful emotional reaction is there – but it’s subdued and drowned out by the ambient noise of existence. Music is the opposite of noise: the cure for noise. By finding the right piece of music at the right time, we’re adding an accompanying score that highlights the emotions we should be feeling more strongly – and allows our own best reactions to be more prominent and secure. We end up feeling the emotions that are our due. We live according to what we are actually feeling.
“The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers.”
“There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.”
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