Indigenous peoples who have never even listened to the radio can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music. A studied suggested that the expression of emotions is a basic feature of Western music, whereas in other musical traditions, music has traditionally more often been appreciated for other qualities, such as group coordination in rituals.
See Pan the Piper dancing in the greenwood dawn...Earth, Water, Fire, Air, dancing round the Maypole...at Beltane, light a Beltane fire, high on the skyline - from Ancient Dream, by Aeolian Songspell
The "Maienschein" - literally, "May-light" or "May-shine" in the above photo epitomises the green glow of sunlight through spring leaves.
Award-winning social psychologist Dacher Keltner believes he’s found the answer to happiness: finding awe. In his book, Awe: The Transformative Power of Everyday Wonder, he shows how this elusive, but powerful, emotion can have physical and psychological effects, impacting our bodies and brains.
In a talk with the RSA in January 2023, Keltner identified opportunities such as introducing "awe design" into hospitals, in order to turn clinical, tiled, bright but sterile environments into contemplative spaces where people can peacefully live...and die.
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So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear
Many evenings of my youth were spent listening to Radio Caroline's "Personal Top 30s", from 6-9pm and 9pm-midnight on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings. My friends and I would write down, swap, be inspired by and gently criticise each others' choices, but none of us ever got round to posting ours in, and our chance vanished into the North Sea with the Mi Amigo in March 1980.
However, since 2008 I have listened almost constantly to Caroline, which plays "Personal Top 15s" every weekday at 10am CET, but again, I've not summoned the nerve to send mine in.
Remembering victims - across all cultures and all times - can remind us of the healing power of togetherness and shared purpose.
"This is the faith from which we start, men shall know commonwealth again..."
Researchers have unearthed what are probably the only surviving recordings of the voices of Virginia Woolf, from 50 years earlier, of Alexander Graham Bell (below) and from a quarter of a century earlier still, perhaps the oldest sound recording of all, French schoolchildren singing Au clair de la lune.
In February 2012 I had the pleasure of seeing Letz Zep in concert in Brussels. However, in December 2012, the surviving members of the genuine article - Led Zeppelin - went to Washington to receive laurels at the 35th Annual Kennedy Center Honors. Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones sat watching from the balcony, as a series of performers paid tribute to the band.
Has any music ever come as close to lifting the veil as Allegri's Miserere Mei? The sound one hears at time 4:48 (ironically the same number as in a much more modern, and in its own way much sadder work of art) in the video below seems to reach as close to the elusive sublime/divine (take your pick) as one could imagine. Little wonder that legend has Mozart "stealing" this music from the Vatican, after hearing it as a boy in the Sistine Chapel and then writing it down from memory.