Music is a beautiful and profound art that people experience throughout their lives. It gives an experience to match any person’s emotions. For instance, when I am feeling nostalgic about life, romance, or just Twilight (as I am a die-hard Twilight fan), I play Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy to transport me to the literary and inspiring world of Edward and Bella. If you can just take a few minutes to listen to it; it’s amazing. Overall, music has a way of taking us out of our world and into a new one.
In a book I was recently reading for Lit Analysis, The Hatred of Poetry, the author Ben Lerner discusses how poetry has a way of giving its audiences an experience beyond the actual world; they enter the divine world without actually having to do work. They are just able to read the words of a poem and let their imaginations take them to a better reality. Music is like poetry in that way; it gives us a new world where we pick and choose what the listen to and what the lyrics or chords mean to us. This visualization process is not just one that we enjoy and live by now, but it is one invoked by many people…for example, John Milton.
In Paradise Lost, Milton describes how he plans to tell the story of Adam and Eve: “Sing, Heav’nly Muse…” (p. 3). By his divine inspiration, Milton was able to take millions of people across a multitude of centuries, back to the beginning of time and share the story of original sin, despite the fact that neither he nor his audience was around during that time (at least, as far as we know of 😉 ). Still, this epic tale that he weaves has music throughout the entire process, “with notes angelical to many a harp their own heroic deeds and hapless fall by doom of battle…their song was partial but the harmony (what could it less when spirits immortal sing?) suspended Hell” (p. 41). The music that Milton describes, the lyrics of angels, have the power to stop people, stop enemies, and essentially change the world. Each beautiful note, that the audience cannot actually hear but can almost imagine, has an essence and an identity that connects the readers to the story of Paradise Lost whether they know it or not. The melodies that we dance to, or sing, or compose, takes us closer to the divine, whether we know it or not, and bring out our true essence; they move us to a place where we no longer care who’s watching or what we look like. Music has the ability to make our spirits free.
Because of that, Milton was able to share a story that is still being told; because of that, we are able to still enjoy music no matter how popular other forms of art become; because of that, we are able to listen to lyrics and feel something, something that makes us cry, or smile, or laugh, or sleep. Music is our inspiration, our accomplice in life, and like Milton, we are able to use it to change our worlds into a place that we can be at home in. So go and listen to Clair de Lune or one of your favorite songs, and recognize the power it has in your life.
Picture link: http://az616578.vo.msecnd.net/files/2016/07/19/636045094637981617-1726625770_black-and-white-music-headphones-life.jpg
Reading Young Adult Literature 
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