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Why music? — 14 Comments

  1. When I was quite young in the early 1960’s, my parents purchased a set of classical music records from Time-Life. I listened to them for hours on end. This Tchaikovsky piece must have been on one of the records as this piece is ingrained in my memory.

    Back the the late 1980’s (before I owned a CD player), I attended a concert of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in an enormous cathedral in Germany. When the music started, I felt a chill run up my spine. That has never happened to me before or since.

    I can only imagine how the recording above sounded in person.

  2. One of my most memorable and inspiring musical experiences was a live performance, in Paris, of music that is three centuries old played in a chapel that is five centuries older: Vivalid’s “Four Seasons” (composed in 1723) performed in La Sainte-Chapelle Chapel (built in 1239-1248).

  3. I’d dance around the room, improvising the movement, and I learned the words to every song in our collection. Me too. But mostly, I would just sit and listen, like you say, over and over until I knew all the words. I still do that.

    AMDG,
    Janet

  4. I’m thinking there were lullabys before there was language. Ancient mothers humming to their babies to comminicate that they loved them. And even today, music alone can sometimes communicate things that our complex verbal language just can’t get around to saying.

  5. There’s a continuium in music reaching from the head to the heart to the crotch. I’m a blues musician of many years standing (many being a number larger than 35) and I can appreciate music for the head, but if that’s all it has then I don’t bother. My preference runs rather lower, and if you call me nyculturnii I don’t mind

  6. We can and will.

    Did you ever notice that for the heavy metal and hair bands, their songs that go platinum are the droopy love ballads. Must drive them crazy.

    Most of us like the head and heart stuff, but if we’re honest, we like the occasional, uh, well, er, uh . . . as you put it . . . crotch music.

    Mighten you youtube us with your favorite selection?

  7. Surprisingly, physicist Richard Feynman had a specific type of amusia: he couldn’t stand melody. Actively disliked it.

    But he could be driven wild by rhythm, and was not only a good bongo player, but drummed his fingers compulsively on any hard surface.

    Surprising, because mathematicians are usually dangerously susceptible to music.

  8. All right. If you won’t do it, I will.

    Fergie and Slash.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FauHsI7A0nc&feature=related

    But the poet was Axel; he made the poem, and like all great poems, it was an accident:

    She’s got a smile it seems to me
    Reminds me of childhood memories
    Where everything
    Was as fresh as the bright blue sky

    Now and then when I see her face
    She takes me away to that special place
    And if I’d stare too long
    I’d probably break down and cry

    Oh, oh, oh
    Sweet child o’ mine
    Oh, oh, oh, oh
    Sweet love of mine

  9. We usually forget that old life was rife with long periods of repetition for marginal living… most repetitious things have rythem to them and they can be accomplished more efficiently by those who have a sense of rythm and can synch their work to each other so that it all works on lock step.

    music does this…
    from working music, to marching music
    today, we use it mostly for masturbation so we forget it had more solid benefits.

    oh.. and some cultures sing like birds to choose mates…

  10. I’m not sure how I’d classify myself. I tend only to listen to music purposely, meaning I do not tend to have music just playing. It irritates me.

    Unlike any other time in history, we have constant and immediate access to music. I’ve often wondered what effect that has on us. Sometimes on the train I look around and ponder how life would be different due to a lack of the music we are so accustomed to if we ever suffered an EMP or other world/life-altering event.

  11. “To this day, music is one of the things that can regularly bring me to tears–even music without words, although words help. When I find a new song or other piece of music that I like, I’ll often listen to it over and over, perhaps twenty times in a row, until it becomes an earworm. Then it plays in my head off and on, perhaps for days, while I listen to it some more and it solidifies and becomes part of my memory. Then I can relax for a while. ”

    The last song I was into like that was “Chocolate Town” by Ween. It’s ok to laugh.

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