When Handel was engaged upon the Oratorio of the Messiah, he was found with his face resting upon the table, his form shaken with sobs. Before him lay the score open at the place where it is written, “He was despised, he was rejected”.
Music unveils for us part of the general harmony of nature, and we feel ourselves partakers of it. This emotional response is found in a piece of music like Beethoven's Fidelio which engenders that feeling of harmony of sisterhood and brotherhood. Plato puts among the principal results of music, that it begets love in the heart, a sympathy with one another and with what is good and true. And Schopenhauer develops the same thought: "The unspeakable inwardness of all music, by virtue of which it brings before us a heaven so near yet so far, arises from the quickening of the inner nature which it produces."
Shakespeare tell us how the opposite feeling of estrangement is the result of a lack of love for music-
" Nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage,
But music for the time doth change its nature.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils:
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus."
Psychotherapy is discovering the inestimable value of music as a means of stabilizing mental health patients and great music can rouse nations to noble causes as seen by Live Aid etc., Let's have some more sweet music for world harmony and peace!
Bruce Springsteen evokes this in that famous song loved by all peace makers .. 'We shall overcome'...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNaXve485MA
In birth a baby shrills a sweet melody of arrival, at death, as all hospice workers know, the last sense to go is our hearing...
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