Music that has a hold of me beyond understanding


I just took a musical bath. I listened, for the umpteenth time, to Puccini's La Boheme. I can't begin to understand how someone could ever create such a thing of beauty. There are many 'songs' that compete in their individual beauty, but no other opera, play, or body of singing that even comes close, for me. You?

newbee

beethoven 7th

 

More than a great choice indeed...

The allegretto directed by Kleiber is the most stunning piece of orchestral music i ever heard... Not the more beautiful... The most powerful cure to ressusciate the dead... It describe for me, not a mere emotion but a real force behind all emotions, the growing seed in the spring awakened and rythmically directed to light ,displacing rocks slowly and emerging IRRESISTIBLY to the surface... Listen to it with this image in your head... I always "see" music and sound more than a feeling but as an objective force...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDpDwZZA248

Perfect too performed on piano:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjdY5-cRyh4

 

Music is not so much mathemathical,   it is the opposite in fact  ; thanks to Alain Connes, we now know that it is  the mathematics core which  is musical...

 

@newbee Thank you for this post. Yes. I've wondered all my life what it is about music that has such incredible power over us. Music defined the course of my life and gives me energy when nearly everything else takes. 

@jeffrey125 The Requiem! Le Grande Macabre! The violin concerto!

To bring things way down back to earth a bit—for me the Be Good Tanya’s and the Wailin Jennies do this. Every plucked banjo string, every accordion squeeze, every blended voice just take hold of my heart and rivet my thoughts. 

I must confess that I heard Lennon’s Let it Be in my early, pre-cynical teens. It is deeply held, close to my heart. That is mostly lyrics, for music, Angela Hewitt playing the Goldberg variations in one continuous sitting at Herbst theater, and the SF Symphony and chorus performing the B Minor Mass were the most transporting experiences, if I discount the Dead in the 70’s where Lysergic Acid Diethlymide and sympathetic audiences had something to do with it.