Music is.....

An old Irish blessing says “Take time to laugh…because laughter is the music of the soul.” Although I love the image this creates, I would argue the opposite. Music is the laughter of the soul. It is also the pain, the compassion, the love and the spirit of the soul. It has the ability to take us wherever we may not necessarily want to go but essentially need to go. Take, for example, the ongoing debate, in some circles, of the negative influence that music has on the youth of today. I cannot comment directly on that argument. However, in my 30 years as a musician I have performed many times in small, intimate shows where the audiences involved are some of the frailest of individuals in our society today – seniors; not only seniors who are active and ageless but also seniors who are in various stages of physical, emotional and psychological illnesses. In many of these presentations, I have seen how music, in its purest forms, has brought people from the depths of despair to the joy of singing; from the vast loneliness of dementia back to the reality of a time when they were the “belle of the ball”. I have watched as someone who has almost given up on living has been rejuvenated, for however brief a moment, and come back to a place and time where their voice was as alive as birdsong on a gentle spring morning. I have seen, time and time again, how music has taken people to places they had forgotten they knew about. I have seen music act as the final closure to people who have lost a loved one. The music has taken them to a place deep within themselves, where they can begin the healing that only true grieving can produce. In essence, music has given them life again. No, I have not seen the negative effects of music and, quite frankly, I am content not to have seen it. I have, however, seen the positive life changing effects of music. The mathematician in me was taught that where there is a positive, there also exists a negative. YOU come to your own conclusions now.