Originally published at The Catholic Thing
I’ve often written here about painting. Now, I want to write about music, a subject about which I’ve no expertise, although I do have 6,261 tracks on my iPhone.
Act I of Noël Coward’s “intimate” comedy, Private Lives, begins with an off-stage orchestra playing some innocuous tune, to which it “returns persistently,” and occasions this exchange:
Elyot: Nasty insistent little tune.
Amanda: Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.
The notion, I guess, is that emotive music – strings swelling in crescendo, perhaps – is manipulative. Sometimes that’s true. Or it may be what these days we call an “earworm.” My grandchildren, still in their toddler period, can’t get enough of the nasty and persistent “Baby Shark.” It’s on my iPhone, of course.
But to my mind, there’s nothing as potent as great music. Plato and Pope Benedict XVI had a similar view. And I have proof.
There’s an Internet meme called “reaction videos,” in which a young adult YouTuber with a “channel” listens to music suggested by a “follower.” Music, that is, the host has not previously heard.
When I first stumbled onto one of these (an African woman listening to Luciano Pavarotti), my first thought was: Really? She’s never
