I wonder if that is why we like music. We can experience emotions without worrying that they are permanent or need to be resolved.
I have no idea why our emotions are so tangled with it and how comes it can untie knots in our minds like this.
Beautifully said.
I have numerous sayings about music, for example I used to do 20 mile runs every Saturday and Sunday and 10 miles every weekday. No David goggins but people always ask question, I tend to tell them I don’t run, I listen to music and the miles run themselves.
And I used to tell people that the music allows me to feel every single cell in my body and the music makes them happy. And truthfully I think there is something to that down to the quantum level, where the music causes your atoms to vibrate putting them in higher states of energy.
Music really is the center of my life, even though i don't play it. .. though i do dabble, and am currently learning Piano, so /shrug.
I wish I had a piano, weighted keys are so sweet. Another fun thing is large congas.. the depth of the sound is surprising.
An arcane text which I highly recommend for those curious is The Manual of Harmonics by Nichomacus the Pythagorean. It’s a series of ancient lectures which dives into why the Pythagoreans were obsessed with how numerical the musical scales are.
I have a version translated and commentated upon by Flora R. Levin which provides exquisite anthropological background of how the ancient Greeks thought of music and provides context for what amounts to as lectures given by Nichomachus.
Schopenhauer, the father of philosophical pessimism, would agree with you: he thought of music as one of the few pure respites from the suffering of the world.
It's amazing to feel emotions I'd normally not want to express in everyday life and just let them flow out. Rage, jealousy, lust. The music is such a great trigger to tap into these primal feelings, and then expressing them through movement just feels incredible. It feels real and amazingly cathartic, but the transience of the experience leaves no consequences.
I guess that's why there's the saying dance like nobody's watching. Because for many people, that expression of feeling strips us down and leaves our feelings exposed and vulnerable .