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Music vitally registers the spectrum of human experience. To take one example, film music — when not merely atmospheric — is psychological, social, sociological, and, at best, stylistically unique, reflecting a personal vision in a collaborative art form. My grandfather,1 a composer from Hollywood's Golden Age, often said (in personal communication) that his intention in both scoring and orchestrating was to express the inner lives of the characters. Current filmmakers, along with using music to shape audience emotions, freqently saturate the sound track with hit songs, evoking the pop-cultural milieu of the characters. At best, the distinctive contributions of the greatest film composers come to be identified with the signature style of the auteur-directors who employ them.
Touching the most intimate human scale, Here I'm Alive, subtitled The Spirit of Music in Psychoanalysis, argues that music is essential for the development and integration of psyche and soma in each of us.2 Prefacing their text by referring to Boethius's musica humana, “the harmony of the human body and spiritual harmony” (cf. “Boethius,” Wikipedia), the authorial trio (Adam Blum, Peter Goldberg, and Michael Levin) of this ambitious, erudite, and playful book3 make a radical claim, summarized in a three-tiered analogy: