Summary:
Closing out WHY YOU LIKE IT is an epilogue that touches on the underlying goals, as articulated by the author, of trying to understand, and especially empower , one’s musical taste: to tap into the unrivaled power of music. The epilogue begins this discussion by tracing the history of music as a healing property: from the medieval notion of musica humana to the establishment of a thriving field of music therapy today. This tracing also includes accounts of music’s claimed and validated therapeutic properties, such as its documented ability to reduce pain, lessen stress, and improve cardiovascular health—as well as to aid those with Alzheimer’s disease and other cognitive challenges. The interlude then continues by highlighting the salutary benefits that music can offer to even healthy humans: enabling an empirical increase in our “subjective well-being” or SWB. Finally, the author offers an invitation—an exhortation, even—that, given music’s beneficial properties and our innate ability to receive them, we all take dedicated steps to empower our musical taste: to engage deeply in the listening experience (at least occasionally), and to never stop expanding our potential to expand and enhance it.
Supplements:
( More on pronouncements on music’s power by Hegel and Schopenhauer—see also n. 766 ):
While critical of some aspects of music, Hegel specifically saw (sung) melody as the unrivaled “language of the soul.” Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation (1819), by contrast, was unequivocally effusive: he considered music, alone of all the arts, to be not just an imitation of the world, but a copy of the Will itself—the desire and “inner nature” that underlies all existence: “The unutterable depth of all music by virtue of which it floats through our consciousness as the vision of a paradise firmly believed in yet ever distant from us, and by which also it is so fully understood and yet so inexplicable, rests on the fact that it restores to us all the emotions of our inmost nature, but entirely without reality and far removed from their pain.”
( More on Donatella Restani’s link between music and embryology—see also n. 774 ):
Restani notes that the link between music and embryology was conveyed most explicitly by the 5th century Neo-Platonic writer Macrobius. In his Commentary on the Dream of Scipio , for example, Macrobius quotes Plato’s Timaeus , whereby he connects the “perfect” numbers 7 and 8 to the three primary musical consonances, the octave, fifth, and fourth; these in turn then aligned with the “phases through which the being-to-life of the human body [the embryo] and its parts occurs.” (“Embryology as a Paradigm”, 165).
( French translation of “therapeutic property of sound”—see also n. 777 ):
In the original French: “la proprieté médicatrice du son.”
Principal Bibliography:
Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (London: Picador, 2012 )
Andrew Schulman, Waking the Spirit: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul (New York: Macmillan, 2016)
Martin West, “Music Therapy in Antiquity,” in Music as Medicine: e History of Music Therapy Since Antiquity , ed. Peregrine Horden (New York: Routledge, 2017)
Donatella Lippi et al., “Music and Medicine,” Journal of Multidisciplinary Healthcare 3 (2010)
Leslie Bunt and Brynjulf Stige, Music Therapy: An Art beyond Words , 2nd ed. (East Sussex, England: Routledge, 2014)
Helen Lindquist Bonny, “Music and Healing,” Music Therapy 6, no. 1 (1986)
Melissa K. Weinberg and Dawn Joseph, “If You’re Happy and You Know It: Music Engagement and Subjective Wellbeing,” Psychology of Music 45, no. 2 (2017)
External Links:
"Music Therapy" (Encylopaedia Britannica)