Unlike Art or Movies - Music has a different kind of power that cannot be compared. The only other thing that can evoke a memory faster is the sense of smell - the ol' olfactory...
I think it's a fascinating idea considering that music can halt a man from stuttering when he sings, can allow the stroke victim to form words and sing when they cannot even speak and calm or aggitate tourettes patients.
We have to just admit here that this medium is different than a horror movie or reading Stephen King or looking at hideous images - there is a very real and serious connection that sound has in our souls and our beings that is not captured in the other influences that "music" is being compared to in this case.
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respectfully snipped:
"That music and especially melody can be profoundly evocative is clear. But what is it that is evoked? Anthony Storr quotes Suzanne Langer and Marcel Proust in this regard. For Proust, ‘Music ... helped me to descend into myself, to discover new things; the variety that I had sought in vain in life, in travel, but a longing for which was nonetheless renewed in me by this sonorous tide.’ Jonathan Miller, the opera director, summarizes this in a single word: the real role of music, in his view, is not to take one outside oneself, but to take one inside oneself. Suzanne Langer goes further, writing that music not only has the power to recall past emotions, but to evoke ‘emotions and moods we have not felt, passions we did not know before.’
This wonderful, enlarging power, can, however, be deeply upsetting to those who need to have their emotions and imaginations under tight control—whether this be obsessive or artistic. Thus, Tolstoy was deeply ambivalent about music—it had, he felt, a power to induce in him ‘fictitious’ states of mind, emotions and images that were not his own, and not under his control. He adored Tschaikovsky's music, but often refused to listen to it, and in The Kreutzer Sonata, he described the seduction of the narrator's wife by a violinist and his music—the two of them play Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata together, and this music is so powerful, the narrator comes to think, that it can change a woman's heart, and cause her to be unfaithful. The story ends with the outraged husband murdering his wife—though the real enemy, he feels, the enemy he cannot kill, is the music."
