Why Music?

You seek music because it brings out of you a sense of community at our most primitive levels.

A tune in your head, a whistle on your lips, a tapping of your toe, music is something that humans have done together as long as we have been human, over 350,000 years.

Every single night, around a protective campfire, men, women, and children gathered and told stories. They beat drums and sticks for rhythm, chanted and sang melodies like the birds they lived amongst, and made music with their families in the safest place around.

Same event over 127,000,000 times. Kind of burnt it into our species’ neurons by repetition, reinforced by generations of doing the same thing every night. The sense of community, family, safety, acceptance, love and wholeness is now deeply ingrained in us. All the good stuff, the good feelings in an otherwise senseless, cold, killing, world.

The rhythm part is the deepest. As you formed inside your mother the first two things you perceived were the rhythm of her heartbeat, and the chemicals in her blood. The feelings that those chemicals produced in her brain, her ‘selfness’ were also circulated through your brain as you started to think. The proto you felt it all! Before birth all you knew was rhythm and emotions. Then you were born, and it all started on top of you knew at that instant, rhythm and feelings.

Rhythm, melody, feeling and sharing, all the most remarkable artifacts of humanity – the essence is that you are never alone when you have music in your life.

-Barry Thornton