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When the music's over
Turn out the lights
Words often fail us—this is certainly true of trying to describe music. But a vivid description can resonate with us and be part of a bodily experience. That resonating can also be amplified by multiple sensory modalities.2 The cover of this fascinating book, for example, is an iconic photograph of the crowd at the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair, which transports some of us “boomers” back to our adolescence and evokes the powerful music of that era. Blum, Goldberg, and Levin, the three co-authors of Here I'm Alive, are them-selves amateur musicians as well as practicing psychoanalysts in the San Francisco Bay Area.
They define “music” in a broad sense, part of “both […] a shared [emphasis added] grammar of embodiment and […] the perceptual fabric in which human beings live” (Blum et al., 2023, p. xi). Music is a precursor to emotional, cognitive and linguistic development in the human infant, a socio-cultural–individual system that the authors call “the weave.”3 In this sense, they identify large group identity (Volkan, 2013; Volkan et al., 2023) as a fundamental, unconscious “overtone” to our individual identities.