Clemency Burton-Hill: We need to get emotional about classical music

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Classical music can get us through tragedy and trauma, it can bring focus, insights and joy. And yet why do we never talk about how it makes us feel? My new podcast asks music lovers, from Alec Baldwin to Ian McEwan, to tell us just that

I remember the time I fully grasped the power of music. I’d broken up with my first proper boyfriend and I couldn’t eat or sleep; I could barely breathe. I was out of my mind with the dismantling grief of teenage heartbreak and I thought my life was ending. The only thing I could bear was music. I wore out the mixtapes he’d made me (everything from the Pharcyde to Radiohead to nascent UK garage); l lay on my bed, tears leaking out of my eyes as I mouthed the lyrics to soppy indie ballad On and On by Longpigs, one of the many bands we’d seen live, at the now demolished Astoria on Charing Cross Road in London. I felt, in those earnest vocals (“You’re the love that I’ve clung to … and I just can’t go on …”) seen, heard, met.

It dawned on me that the music was having an effect beyond the delicious, cathartic indulgence of creating a space in which I could wallow in my misery. It seemed simultaneously to be showing me a way out of that space. And, although I became the kind of person who would say they couldn’t live without music, it was almost 20 years before that casual assumption was put to the test again.

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This post was syndicated from Health | The Guardian. Click here to read the full text on the original website.


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