A friend of mine, a classical guitarist, sent me the link to a post titled We need music to survive. It’s all worth reading, a meditation on the value of music.
One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not value me as a musician. I remember my mother’s reaction when I announced my decision to study music instead of medicine: “You’re wasting your SAT scores!” My parents love music, but at the time they were unclear about its value.
The confusion is understandable: We put music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper. But music often has little to do with entertainment. Quite the opposite.
After you read the rest of the article at the link above, you might pop over here. You’ll note that I disagree with the author (at the link above) about some of the finer points of the relationship between “art” and music, but I’m in sympathy with his general point. To me, the mere fact of music, that it exists at all, and is what it is, is a very deep mystery.
