On music

We went to see the MSO today, part of a children's concert series. Both of the children enjoy classical music so we thought that this would be a nice way to expose them.
It's cliché to go on about the magic of music. I understand the physics involved: a wave disturbing the air, the vibrations picked up by our ear drums which convert them into the sensation of sound. But that doesn't begin to describe it. I am not a musician, and therefore can only describe it from a listener's perspective.
The visceral tug on your soul as the notes align and and the frequencies and waves move out from the instruments and musicians and penetrate and flow through your body and the bodies of the rest of the audience. Everyone experiencing the sensual joy of the sound passing through them, no two people absorbing the music in the same way and yet all enraptured by its being, by its creation from silence. It's ability to invoke so much joy and sorrow and life, falling into the harmony and dissolving into the vibrations which run through your body in waves of sensual experience.
It allows me to feel awe, to rejoice and wonder at how amazing we are and how incredibly marvelous it all is, and it often makes me cry. I catch my breath and let my body flow along the notes, the chords, the fingers and breath that give the music life. The intimacy that is shared so joyfully, fully, completely between strangers.