How has music changed my life?
The question seems so vague, broad, and unanswerable. Yet, at the same time, if I were to rearrange the words and make it into a statement, music has changed my life, it becomes a statement which is completely true, and could explain my life, and why I live.
Do I know how I came to love music? No, I have no idea whatsoever. I suppose you’d have to ask the composers who wrote the songs that continuously play over and over in my head day after day and inspire me. When you study composers, their music, and what was going on in their lives and surroundings at the time of composition, that in itself can tell you everything. A composer who, say, suddenly fell in love and decided to write a symphony or piano concerto wouldn’t be writing in a minor key, leaving the listener feeling as if he/she were about to die. Correspondingly, composers who were very depressed wrote from of the saddest-sounding music, which in contrast, is some of the most beautiful music ever composed. For example, when Tchaikovsky wrote his sixth symphony, many of his relatives had recently passed, and he knew he was going to be asked by the government to kill himself for a scandal that had been made public. The deep, minor melodies and rants from the low brass and high-pitched weeps from the violins, without a doubt, correspond to the feelings the composer must have been feeling, knowing he would be dying. Approximately three days after Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere of his symphony, he was dead.
So how does this all tie together? Music has taught me that no matter what my emotion, whether it is deeply despondent or utterly delighted, I can always turn to it, and it will comfort me. Music speaks as clearly to me as does the person I’m having a conversation with. Music is full of so many emotions: love, hate, passion, anger, excitement, and suffering, one just needs to know how to find it. I can sit down at the piano and start playing the feeling I...