Why the Power of Music and Love Transcend Every Void

Teresa Neumann (February 5, 2008)

"Music is a form of sensed continuity that can sometimes break through the most overpowering disconnections in our experience of time. There is something spiritual about music, and something musical about the human spirit...God is the composer and librettist. We are each called on to be voices in the choir, singers of God's song."

(London)—A touching Times U.K. report has addressed the profound effect music has on us. As an example, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks quotes from Oliver Sacks' book, Musicophilia, which in turn tells the "poignant story" of Clive Wearing, an "eminent musician and musicologist, who was struck by a devastating brain infection," resulting in amnesia so acute that he was unable to remember anything for more than a few seconds.

Though we are often admonished to "live in the present," Wearing's wife described her husband's shattered life this way: "It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment."

Of having no memories of anything whatsoever, Wearing himself said, "I haven't heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelt anything. It's like being dead."

Amazingly, however, Wearing could sense (rather than remember) the love he and his wife shared, and he could still sing, play the organ and conduct a choir. Love and music. It caused many to ask why, of every emotion and gift, were those two so profoundly resilient?"

Victor Zuckerkandl wrote: "Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown."

Rabbi Sacks notes in his report: "Music is a form of sensed continuity that can sometimes break through the most overpowering disconnections in our experience of time. There is something spiritual about music, and something musical about the human spirit. When the Israelites experienced redemption at the Red Sea, they sang. So did Hannah when she had a child. The Levites sang in the Temple...When language takes wing heavenward, it modulates from speech to song...Beneath the silence [of the earth], audible only to the inner ear, Creation sings to its Creator."

Sacks shares other insights into the power of music and its connection with the spirit, saying that faith is more like music than science because science analyses whereas music integrates. "Faith connects episode to episode, life to life, age to age in a timeless melody that breaks into time," he says. "God is the composer and librettist. We are each called on to be voices in the choir, singers of God's song."

Concludes Sacks: "Love and music redeem our solitude, mending the broken connections of our lives. Faith teaches us to hear the music beneath the noise."

Read more of this inspiring story by following the link provided.

Source: Jonathan Sacks - The Times U.K.