Music heals. In the deepest abysses of sorrow, music heals, soothes, takes us somewhere with no time and space.
Listening to a piece by Garth Brooks, Time by Hans Zimmer, Schindler’s List by John Williams etc etc, through the earphones at top volume and sobbing in rhythm with it all can be an utterly cleansing, cathartic experience.
Here’s one more. On The Nature of Daylight by the British composer Max Richter. The video takes us for a walk with the wonderful Elisabeth Moss. On a journey that you the listener must find the appropriate adjectives to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InyT9Gyoz_o&list=RDInyT9Gyoz_o&start_radio=1
There are many ways to interpret what happens here, all depending upon who you are and where you are at. How much you register, let yourself feel, how willing you are to be swept away by music.
One interpretation is that her profound sadness - for that is what it is - has to do with that one point that she is passing on the road where people have left flowers and candles to commemorate someone who died there. Did she know them? At the cafe, did she listen to an answering machine, and the voice of someone who wouldn’t be there anymore?
It could be anything though. But the breaking point comes at the first steps she needs to climb that prove just too much. She breaks into inconsolable crying. And in some crazy way, there is beauty in that sadness. For it holds the promise of healing, if immersed in it, facing it. Just as animals find a secluded spot to die in peace, we humans need to find a quiet spot to pour out our tears. And music… Music can then lift us up.
Or if not music, then someone somewhere nearby that you can honestly touch. Hopefully. Or a stroll in the forest surrounded by tall, majestic trees that have been there for ages, and will be long after we are gone. It may almost feel like the trees can absorb our sadness, and cure us on a deep, unspoken level.
Someone said in the comments of the above video that Max Richter & Hans Zimmer are the Beethoven & Mozart of our time ! Yes.
And naturally, you don’t need to be sad to get the full benefits of being touched by music. For we are like vessels that may at any given point do just fine but would do even better by being flooded with a few soft touches of a piano key, rinsed with the moaning of a saxophone, and purified by the high notes of a violin. Music heals.
There is of course no end to the melodies that move us. Heal us. We can become one with the soundwaves conceived by another, centuries past. The quiet followed by thunder, stillness by speed. Lyrics playing their part at times. And the complex followed by simple, but like in the spectrum, the white containing all colors, of life.