Music that has a hold of me beyond understanding

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. 

@mahgister

She can sing Bach, Verdi, Shubert or Schumann or any spirituals and would had sing jazz over any other female singer...

A matter of taste, surely.

How many Jazz fans enjoy Jazz sung with a classical vibrato?

Sarah Vaughan is perhaps the most "operatic" of Jazz singers but she still doesn’t sound like an opera singer.

I’ve never enjoyed Joan Baez or more recently, Rhiannon Giddens, precisely due to their vibrato. Giddens trained as an opera singer -- not sure where Baez acquired it, but to my ear, at least, it sounds very out of place in the Folk genre.

Perhaps I’m biased towards preserving a certain integrity when it comes to musical genres. No doubt, there are others who are all for breaking down the characteristics that traditionally define genres and fusing them into something new.

I can’t imagine classical guitar played with a Blues-style vibrato, for example but perhaps there are those who would find it appealing.

More to the OP’s point, as music is a language that operates on multiple levels, simultaneously, I don’t find it surprising that we may be strongly affected by a certain piece without necessarily being able to discern why or, that we may not be able to even name the particular/combination of emotions, it evokes.

A composer (presumably) is intimately familiar with how various factors such as time signature, key, intervals, timbre, dissonance/consonance, density, etc. are likely to impact a listener. As to why-- well, that’s a more difficult question.