In reading Ralph Ellison’s “Living with Music” and Oliver Sacks’s “A Bolt from the Blue,” I have encountered several extreme examples of people defining themselves through music. In Ralph Ellison’s “Living with Music,” he talks about how, “In those day it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.” This shows how people look at music in all different ways, some just look at it as something to listen to and some people look at is as something more, more than noise. Some people can’t live without music because it helps in several different way, it helps them express their feelings, express their emotions, it helps them relieve stress, and it could also help them bring up their mood, most of the time to create happiness in their thoughts and heart. So,depending on our perception of music, it shows how we listen to it and why we listen to it.

In Oliver Sacks’s “A Bolt from the Blue,” Dr. Tony Cicoria, after being struck by lightning, having a near death experience, and an out of body experience, literally seeing his own body when his consiousness came out of his body, he suddenly had a huge desire to listen to piano music and/or classical music in general. This is what amazed him and has also amazed me but what’s also interesting is that when he was young, he only had a few piano lessons but had no real interest. He says that, “He did not have a piano in his house. What music he did listen to tended to be rock music.” After this incident, he developed a love for piano/classical music, almost like an addiction to it. He states that he, “would get up at four in the morning and play till I went to work, and when I got home from work I was at the piano all evening.” He thinks that he had been saved for a special purpose, that he was allowed to survive because of the music. This could also most likely be due to something happening in the brain.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.