Recently my husband surprised me with a date to the symphony. I was entranced at how the musicians so intimately connected with their individual instruments. Closing my eyes I allowed the music to sweep over me as if I was riding up and down the waves of the piece. And all the stress, worries, and concerns of the week seemed to just dissipate. Afterwards my husband and I had a profound discussion of what memories the music evoked in us, how the music made us feel, and what was going on in our minds as we listened.
I grew up in a very large, musical family. It seemed everyone in the family had an instrument of choice or a voice to match…piano, clarinet, trumpet, saxophone, classical guitar, bass guitar, drums, and the list goes on. Members in my immediate and extended families were in jazz bands (my 81 year old dad still is!), Irish bands, school bands, went on tour with opera companies, recorded cds, had the familiar voice behind some nationally well known commercials, and owned a recording studio.
And me? I was the one who got her knuckles rapped with a ruler by the elderly piano teacher because I couldn’t keep to the beat of the metronome, I never made school choirs, as a child my highest musical accomplishment was playing “Ten Little Indians” on the violin, and as a teacher my 1st graders would laugh when Mrs. Jackson tried to sing. I just didn’t get the family music gene…
I have had people say to me, I’m not musically inclined. And I just smile because I thought so too for quite some time. But research says differently…our brains and bodies respond to music in such a way that researchers go so far as to say, we are wired for music…all of us. Appreciation of music begins at birth and studies have documented how an infant’s heartbeat lowers when listening to lullabies and enters into deeper sleep…music is linked to memory and neuroscientists have found that music helps the brain to create new pathways to help a child learn things such as the names of states or the letters of the alphabet…music influences our emotions and there are brain spikes in areas of our brain associated with reward and motivation when we listen to music we love… music calms and energizes and inspires…and the studies reach beyond the human person to find that animals too from whales to apes to seals make their own kinds of music.
There is something I read a number of years ago that deeply touched me..
There is a tribe in East Africa where the birth of a child is marked not on the day of the physical birth, but the first time the child is a thought in the mother’s mind. Aware of her intention to conceive a child with a particular father, the mother goes off alone and sits under a tree. There under the tree she sits and listens until she can hear the song of the child she hopes to conceive. Once she has heard it…She goes back to her village and teaches it to the father so they can sing it together as they make love, inviting the child to join them. The mother sings this song to the baby in her womb. She teaches it to the old women and midwives of the village so that at the miracle of birth the child is greeted with this song. This song is taught to all the villagers so when the child falls or hurts himself they sing this song to comfort. This song becomes part of the marriage ceremony and at the end of life, loved ones gather around the deathbed and sing this song for the last time.
I may not be a musician, but I have learned the art of being in the audience. I believe we are all wired for music in ways we cannot even yet understand…we all have a song within…that unique collaboration of notes and sounds that move us…
perhaps the search to discover who we really are and our purpose in life begins with discovering the song within.
PS I know my 95 pound dog would agree…she literally jumps around and throws up her toys every time she hears the song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams. She has found her song within!
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