What Is The Point Of Music?

Music is much more about the spirit and of finding the self while at the same time a part of the collective. Musicians, like people of the arts, tap into the collective universal flow of divine energy while they’re creating music whether they know it or not, which the ancient Indian script the ‘Natyashastra‘ suggests.

Creating music involves finding oneself within the patterns and structures of music. That part of it which is yours, that nobody can take away from you, that individuality, within the forms and flow of music makes it both personal and universal.

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“Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional,” said Oliver Sacks, while great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed, “Without music, life would be a mistake“.

The legendary frontman Jim Morrison in his poetry book ‘Wilderness’ wrote, “No one can remember an entire novel. No one can describe a film or a piece of sculpture, a painting. But so long as there are human beings, songs and poetry can continue.”

Music is eternal in the way it lives on standing the test of time and the way it elevates and moves people. Music gives life to the sceneries and moments of our lives, just like a soundtrack of a film. In essence, it’s the art form that touches people’s lives in a way no other art form can.

As an aspiring musician, I’m always pushing myself to keep improving and enhancing my abilities within the art form, so in a way it’s inspiring and a form of motivation, just like the way it pushes athletes to run faster and harder or the way it motivates the office worker to work harder or just like the way it inspires a writer to write something better than the usual, or the artist to paint vivid pictures and the way it makes lovers express their love for each other.

It provides purpose and enhances our living experience. It quickly changes the mundane to life. No film or a lifetime would be complete without music, there would be no dance if it wasn’t for music.

We must sing and dance to the music, just as Alan Watts the English philosopher and writer brilliantly puts it, “We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end: success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead.

But we missed the point the whole way along.

It was a musical thing — and you were supposed to sing, or dance, while the music was being played.”

In his TED talk, Nitin Sawhney a British musician of Indian origin looks back on his life’s journey through music, right from banging on the piano as a child to playing various genres of music in bands as a young adult and living his life as a musician and how he tries to find patterns in the structures of music and himself in the process.

He touches upon several examples of how through the centuries music has helped us tap into something more. Something eternal, something greater than ourselves.

What is the point of music?

It’s the universal sound.