Enjoying Music

When we talk about the enjoyment of food, we are not generally thinking about the 'grabbing' of a greasy hamburger from the drive-thru on our way to a ball-game that we should have been at 5 minutes ago. When we talk about the enjoyment on nature, we generally don't gravitate toward a picnic in the middle of a busy city street. When we talk about enjoyment of art, our minds don't lean toward discussing the merits of the 'visual perspective and composition' in a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, and when we think about a thing like Canadian culture, crime and poverty might easily take a backseat to Hockey and Peacekeeping.

So in considering music, the pure enjoyment of it shouldn't be: rushed, as in the way we sometime eat; cluttered, with peripheral noise of the busyness of life, like a busy street; frivolous, like the cheap art of cartoons and media; or 'out of context', like misplacing the virtue for the vice in music.

The context for this will be to slow down, let the music take the centre stage, feel it's full meaning and see the good and the beautiful within it's forms.

ENJOY YOUR MUSIC THIS WEEK!

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead. ~Benjamin Disraeli

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific. ~Aaron Copland

Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die. ~Paul Simon

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. ~Confucius

Music can noble hints impart,

Engender fury, kindle love,

With unsuspected eloquence can move,

And manage all the man with secret art.

~Joseph Addison