MUSIC brings us together by releasing feel-good chemicals in the brain, such as dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins. It synchronizes our heart rates and brainwaves through rhythm and creates shared emotional experiences during cultural and social events.
Within the home, music creates a deeper emotional connection. Whether through the first instances of musical bonding between a mother and her infant or through listening to music together as a family, it fosters family identity and social closeness—bonds that can last throughout a child’s life.
Is music important in your life? If you ask me, the answer is yes! Music can improve your health and well-being.
A Harvard study has shown that relaxing music may lower blood pressure and heart rate after physical exertion. It can also improve one’s mood and reduce anxiety. By bringing people together, music can also serve as an antidote to loneliness and social isolation.
Music is also a creative outlet. It gives people from all social and cultural backgrounds an opportunity to express themselves.
Whether they seek to convey a political message or a particular emotion—or simply create for the sheer joy of it—musicians have used sound and music since the dawn of humankind to express themselves and make their voices heard.
Then there is another side of music in family life: the heckling. “Is that music, or can it be deleted?”
I remember the irritation on my parents’ faces—as if they were looking into a broken mirror! Once upon a time, we, too, went crazy listening to the sounds of our idols. In my case, that was sometime during the 1960s and 1970s.
I felt “satisfaction” while listening to the Rolling Stones or dancing to the Beatles. I had feverish dreams with Pink Floyd and could not contain myself when listening to “Da Da Da,” part of the German New Wave that later swept across the world—yes, even reaching the Philippines.
Today, we have become the parents of another younger generation. Is there room for a diplomatic discussion? What music is popular nowadays?
Rap or house? Or something like that? Is it noise, din, racket and fuss—or simply damage to my own musical sensibilities?
I remember harmonious chords played on flutes and my accordion. Later, I found myself at the piano….
How important is music to our existence? Our underfunded music curricula cannot answer that question adequately. Even some recent efforts to validate music have backfired. Consider the famous “Mozart effect” study. Using faulty science, the study sought to demonstrate music’s usefulness by proving that it improved students’ performance in “more important” subjects! “Think how absurd this would sound if we turned it inside out,” Daniel Levitin pointed out in his book This Is Your Brain on Music. “If I claimed that studying mathematics helped musical ability, would policy makers start pumping money into math for that reason? Music has often been the poor stepchild of public schools, the first program to get cut when there are funding problems, and people frequently try to justify it in terms of its collateral benefits, rather than letting music exist for its own rewards.”
What type of music connects people? The fusion of genres such as hip-hop and reggae has created new subcultures and communities of fans. Throughout history, music has also been used to advance social change and political movements. It has the power to inspire and mobilize people to take action and make a difference.
Two generations—perhaps even three by now—can come together through music. Let us strike the right chord, no matter which generation we belong to.
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Email: doringklaus@gmail.com, follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn or X (formerly Twitter), or visit www.germanexpatinthephilippines.blogspot.com or www.klausdoringsclassicalmusic.blogspot.com./PN
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