All about music

Arts and Letters Daily has vastly contributed to my intellectual life (before you sneer, yes, there is more to it than mere mashed potatoes!) ... for years I have been a faithful daily visitor there.  Today's experience there is all about music. 

I would not have known otherwise that "Monday, Feb. 22, is Frédéric Chopin's 200th birthday. That is, it's Fryderyk Chopin's birthday; the Polish-born, Paris-dwelling composer's name is more commonly spelled these days with Ys. And that's his birth date according to a baptismal certificate"

The music-challenged person that I am, the technical terms like "rubato" makes me wonder all the more whether I know anything at all.  It feels great to walk like an ignoramus.  But, I could understand this much: "Although Chopin himself was said to shrink away from too-loud playing, there's plenty in it that thunders and plenty that's assertive. It's also strikingly original. Chopin, unlike many composers of his day, wasn't under the sway of Beethoven. He abhorred, for instance, the start of the last movement of the Fifth Symphony; his primary influences were earlier, particularly Johann Sebastian Bach."  Really?  Chopin abhorred the Fifth Symphony? 

So, why music in the first place?  Why do we value it so much?  Apparently science cannot quite explain this!

We do not love music because it exercises our brains or makes us more attractive to members of the opposite sex, but because we have lived with it since we came into being: it is entwined in our common and individual consciousness to the extent that, simply put, we would not be ourselves without it. In contemplating the mysteries of music we are also thereby contemplating the mystery of ourselves.