pt at large

Music, Emotion, Well-Being and Why You Choose It

The past 20 months of living with a  pandemic changed everything. 

Listening to music has been my safe, soul stirring, dancing in the kitchen source of joy. Every culture has a musical outlet, social, secular, spiritual, and I'll bet each of them uses music as a buffer.

What's with that?

Well,

• musical pleasure (think dopamine, same effect as food, sex and drugs)

• musical anticipation (whether expected or surprising)

• refined emotions (stimulate emotional processing of different parts of your brain)

• memories (the durable power of music triggers connections and creates associations)

• action tendencies (wanting to shake your booty)

• emotional mimicry (can make you feel sad or happy)

• consumer behavior (background music)

• mood regulation (refuge from cares of the day)

• time perception (pleasant music seems to tends to mitigate thinking about your shopping list and cares of the day)

• and identity development (popular music reminds us of memories or future anticipations) are in the mix.

All in all, a positive alternative to a cup of coffee to diminish fatigue or a sip of your favorite beverage to buoy you up. Free, legal, and morale boosting.

SOURCE

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/science-choice/201908/music-emotion-and-well-being

Nietzsche on Music and other quotes

Friedrich Nietzsche was my kind of guy. He stretched his definition of  'dance' like silly putty to consider matters philosophical, whimsical and practical. His thinking pre-dated psychological studies like this one .

Consider this collection...
"I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.' "

"Without music, life would be a mistake... I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance."

"Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education; dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?"

"Real dancers are the ones who can hear the music in their soul."

"He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying."

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
"We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once."

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."

"He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying."

"At present I am light, now I fly, now I see myself below me, now a god dances through me."

"Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing."
 
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

No wonder I feel like I'm in an altered state every time I'm on the dance floor.

Quotes like this are tossed about often, usually without knowledge of the man who coined them.

"It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages."

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."

 

Marcus Roberts: "Gershwin For Lovers"

Coffee Series servings...notes scribbled while listening to my CD collection as I enjoy my first cup of coffee...

MARCUS ROBERTS, Gershwin for Lovers, Columbia, 1994

This album - piano, bass, drums - is the penultimate classic jazz trio collaboration. Roberts interprets Gershwin as swing, a subtle rumba, and jazz infused ballads. He mixes it up with gorgeous lightly struck chords and arpeggios that nail the personal groove he stamps on Gershwin songs.

I’ve heard Gershwin 100 times. This is one of the most refreshing. Swing, sly Latin, a soft hint of blues, all three musicians in the same groove, point and counterpoint. Percussion soft sweet and definitive, the arrangements are inventive and totally in spirit with the Gershwin intent that can be performed buoyantly, or as a ballad, or soft or lazily swinging.

Roberts finds the groove between fresh and traditional. Upright bass of Robert Veal and fresh riffs by drummer Herlin Riley take off in flight that is always in the vapor trail of Marcus Roberts lead.

A Foggy Day

The Man I Love

Our Love Is Here To Stay

Summertime

Someone To Watch Over Me

It Ain’t Necessarily So

Nice Work If You Can Get It

They Can’t Take That Away From Me

How Long This Been Going On?

But Not For Me

Produced by Marcus Roberts

Executive Producer Dr. George Butler

A Nocturnal Ramble

October 12, 2021

Nocturnal ramble up Palfrey Street and beyond. 

 

A perfect cloudless autumn evening, dusky dome of the universe overhead, Jupiter presiding in regal resplendence, this is a night for rambling and ruminating.

 

Trees lining the street, not yet yielding their chlorophyll, exhale the oxygen I am breathing in by the lung-full on an inspired march up the 45° incline of Palfrey Street.

 

The organic olfactory rush of just-cut grass, freshly laid down mulch covering gardens and flowerbeds, the uncomplicated quality of it in the still of the night, catches me by surprise, transports me to my earliest memories of autumn evenings when I was a kid. 

 

I’m overwhelmed by nostalgia, grateful for the time travel to a simpler, less complicated world, one in which the biggest choice that I  pondered for the whole month of October was how would I make a really fun costume, one in which my mother would perennially come to my rescue.

 

The Halloween lights and decorations along Palfrey Street, eye popping or subtle, a welcome tonic showing home owners having fun in these days when we’re grateful to be reminded of a sense of normalcy. 

 

Feet propped up as I sit on my front porch, I'm satisfied with an invigorating march around my neighborhood  with surprising reminisces from the past and an aromatherapy session to boot.

Watertown from one of the highest elevations in town.

 

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.