Striking a Chord

Have you ever heard someone say ‘Oh that strikes a chord with me!’

Music has the capacity to touch the human heart in ways that sometimes are beyond our understanding. It is a space which can be timeless and can connect us with the source of all life and bring us home to ourselves. 

Each week, a prominent radio station here in Australia, during one of their morning classical programmes invites the listener to experience ‘a musical hug’ for the day as they play a selected piece of music. What a beautiful way of gifting humanity with an experience of connection, warmth and joy for the day! 

The expression of music, listening to it, singing, playing, has the capacity to take us to a deeper place where imagination, dreaming, memory and healing live. 

The great 12th Century musician, poet, philosopher and saint, Hildegard of Bingen speaks of her experience of music in her life as ‘varieties of sounds and silences... sometimes gestating and gentle, must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.’

For Hildegard, music is like a symphony being played in every moment and experience of life and is divine in nature.

Many Indigenous peoples know this most profoundly. Songlines and the ‘song of life’ is also a concept for the Ancient Celts. Their poetry and music found its expression in the shape, texture, and formations of the land, sea and sky. In the Celtic mind, the most important part of the music or song occurs not when you are listening, playing or singing the music itself. It is in the vibration and resonance that is heard and felt within the soul and in all of creation in the quiet space long after the song comes to an end.  

More importantly, it is in this space that the song continues to reverberate and ‘play’ long after your entry into the song and taking your leave of the song. This is the divine space. The space of collective memory. The musical stream. It is given to you, it is received, and then shared down the generations through time with anyone who wishes to hear it, sing it, play it, pray it. A true musical hug!

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, surely tuned into the particular music being sung in him when he mused, "music is my life and my life is music.”

What is the particular music that brings me Life? Joy? Peace? Healing and Health?

What could be my ‘musical hug’ for today?