I think we respond to music on different levels. I respond most strongly to music on a visceral level. I have found that the music I love most has a parallel in my body movements. I love things that seem to float and crash, spin and twirl, speed up and then come to a grinding halt, sometimes they go up and down like rolling over a hilly landscape, sometimes they go rat a tat in a syncopated stutter like a car speeding over a bumpy road. And all of these things I feel in my body. Sometimes I want to move my hands to the music, or dance and I love to watch how a great conductor just channels the music and relays it through his gestures. And let’s not forget how many songs are beautiful because they mimic the tempo of the human heart. Boom ba boom…
I love cha cha and waltzes. The repetition of that steady beat has a very soothing effect. I love klezmer and gypsy (Romany) music and folk songs because they make me want to dance. I love the way marching band music (of the old sort, not the weird pop songs they do now) lifts your spirits! The beat of the drums, all that brass!!!
How does music do this? I think it is a shorthand way of coding human experience. Even without lyrics music is a translation of human emotions into sounds. It can pull at our emotions because it reminds us of things. Elemental things like a human heartbeat, and more dramatic things like fireworks on the 4th of Jully bursting in the sky. More subtle things like swaying to a beat on the dancefloor. Happy things like a spring day playing hopscotch with the sun beaming down on you. A song can feel like that and bring you back to it just as smells can transport you.
Besides the visceral experiencing of music there is its’ emotional resonance. The sounds and lyrics pull at your heart and mind. You feel what the singer is telling you to feel (if the song is any good and if you are receptive) I love to hear a little catch in the throat, a soaring like the singer is on top of the world and wants to take you there too, simple stupid everyday happiness too! (59th St Bridge song, Feeling Groovy,) I even love Gospel music despite the fact that I am not all that religious. I just love to see a singer like Liz Wright pour out her self and do that thing Gospel singers do, it’s a sort of motion of holding in a tension that is so great that it cannot be expressed. You see it in their arms bent at elbow and their hands emoting this incredible intensity of feeling. You can see they feel it all through their body.
I haven’t even begun to talk about sentimental aspects of music which deeply affect me. I am so sentimental that for every great romance in my life I have songs for all the special days. I know it’s kind of sick. But when I hear a certain song, I think of a certain day. Maybe the song was playing that day or maybe the lyrics came to remind me of it later, but I connect that day with that song and I hold it in my memory as something special. so every time I hear that song I am reminded of a special memory. And of course I have my wedding song and my parent’s wedding song which is the best! Unforgettable by Nat King Cole.
Lyrics are very important to me. I love the fusion of melody with voice poetically expressing emotions.
Lastly I think that music effects us in almost the same way as nature does. I know a song where the banjo reminds me of water trickling over rocks in a brook. And there are many others in all forms of music that do the same. We are keyed into this musical expressiveness and understand it intuitively. It doesn’t take thought so much as openess to the aesthetic qualities inherent in the sounds.