Does music affect our lives?

From when are born until we die, music is an essential part of our day-to-day life. It benefits the growth of children by stimulating their senses; it helps to reduce chronic pain, stress and anxiety; listen to it daily can reduce heart rate and blood pressure; it improves our concentration and calms us, especially in the case of a sleep disorder. Music reduces fatigue and is a stimulant for increasing productive capacity and efficiency; it increases our optimism, our self-esteem and helps us to socialise because music is really good for meeting people and for bringing together groups of different tastes and characteristics.
  

 

Music is present in the most important moments of our existence although we aren’t conscious of it; it is the personal soundtrack of our sadness, happiness, loneliness, hopes, disappointments and wishes. Music is always there in any instant that we share with our family, friends, lovers, enemies, acquaintances and strangers. All of us have some music that has branded us for life and each time we hear it we can remember feelings evoked by that melody. Do you remember your first memory related to music? Even though it’s a bit faint, I am almost sure that it was when my mother sang traditional lullabies to me and my brother. She sang the lullabies that she had learnt from her mother and my grandmother from her mother too. I remember those tones that kept me calm when I was ill and when I couldn’t sleep because of childhood fears. But the fact that really marked me was when I was eight and I learnt to play the piano. It was one of the best things that my parents did in my childhood because it was the beginning of my passion for music. A few years later I started to play the clarinet and it was more fun than playing the piano because I not only took my clarinet lessons but I also played in a band for fifteen years. Those years in the band were very important for me as they covered my adolescence until I finished my degree. So I grew up playing pasodobles and zarzuelas and performing works by great classical composers like Mozart, Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Vivaldi, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Wagner. During those years which I played in the band I met a lot of people that became my friends, and some of them still are today; besides this, I had my first love too, a kind of teenage romance that grew to the rhythm of “The Bodyguard” soundtrack. Who hasn’t gone through this? Thinking about it makes me smile...

Although I liked playing the piano and classical music in the band, the kind of music that I really loved was very different; I used to listen to rhythm & blues, English pop, American rock (especially grunge) and film soundtracks, because I liked cinema very much. It was because of my interest in films that I discovered the song that would mark my life forever: I will survive performed by Gloria Gaynor, one of the most positive and optimistic songs that has been composed in the last fifty years. The first time I heard this song was in the film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and it really made a great impact on me because this film was a tribute to freedom, a defense of minority equality, a desire for self-improvement, an acceptance of differences and a support for the values of friendship and family. However, what most affected me was the place where the story took place: the Australian desert, a special and powerful setting, a remote, isolated and idyllic place which has always evoked in me a estrange sensation of emptiness that has fascinated me from an early age. I don’t know if it was the real reason why that song shocked me so much but since then it has been my favourite song.

    

Is there anybody that doesn’t have a leitmotiv? I don’t think so. I will survive is mine. Three words that many years ago changed my life forever. Three words that give me the strength that sometimes I lose because they rekindle my lost feelings in moments of sadness and uncertainty and help me to smile when I need to; because there is always a reason for surviving. 
   

Is there any song that has affected your life? Think about it...

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