We also share specific songs in our collective national memory: “Amazing Grace” at a church service or “Happy Birthday” at a dinner party.īut our connection to music goes even deeper, to our very core as human beings. Starting in our youth, music helps us find and define our immediate social cliques and communities, becoming the soundtrack of our emerging identity: Are we mods or rockers, East Coasters or West Coasters, Swifties or Kat圜ats? On a deeper level, the music of our respective cultures binds us together via their underlying rhythms, harmonies and scales: the major / minor scales of the West, the pentatonic scales of China, the microtonal inflections of the Middle East, etc. Is our musical isolation playing a contributing role in the broader fragmentation of our society? That would be terribly ironic - because music, as much as any other human invention, is an inherent unifier.
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