Quote of the Day - 12/28/2011

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. – Dr. Lewis Thomas (quoted in Piano Lessons: Music, Love, and True Adventures  by Noah Adams)

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There are so many ways to listen to music today. It can be with us every moment of our day. But is it really playing the same role Dr. Thomas described?

There are times it seems that music is the way we build a wall around ourselves to block out the parts of the world we don’t particularly want to be in rather than making any effort at all. It can be like ingesting something that modifies our biology to numb or heighten…somehow change…our perception of the world.

Making our own music may be closer to what Dr. Thomas was thinking about. Doesn’t everyone sometimes hear their own personal music in their head? I’ve often wondered if it is the summation of our auditory history being rearranged and uniquely played back - sometimes as recognizable scores and sometimes totally new music. The composers among us are the ones that succeed in writing it down in a form others can read.

Does the history of music reflect the cultures of history (i.e. the way our brains have been changed by culture)?