April 2025: A Love Letter to Music
My thanks to Kyle for this beautiful guest essay!
There are many unprecedented events happening in the world right now, but I am far from qualified to speak on any of them. Let this be a brief respite from all of it!
Why do we love music so much? Why do certain sound waves evoke such powerful feelings of joy, sorrow, and love?
It’s hard to say. The answer is more straightforward for music with lyrical content. Humans are story-loving, pattern-loving creatures, and modern songs offer the best of both worlds. Take Taylor Swift’s discography as an example. In every song, she brings us into a world that is familiar (her traditional pop chord progressions and Jack Antonoff’s safe, synth-heavy production) and occasionally unexpected (her rhymes and her wordplay) — with her bridges providing precisely the right amount of harmonic and narrative surprise.
In other cases, music is imbued with meaning by its cultural context. Consider Chopin’s “Revolutionary” Etude, written in response to the failed Polish uprising against Russia in 1831, Liszt’s Funérailles, mourning the failure of the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, or even Prokofiev’s propagandistic Zdravitsa, commissioned by Stalin. Music written without an intentional imagistic purpose often inadvertently takes on meaning as well: for example, Bach’s famous D minor Toccata and Fugue immediately evokes Halloween and Dracula despite having no original connection to the macabre.
Of course, this doesn’t explain why music, presented in a vacuum, maintains such a powerful hold on humans. If it exists, the real answer might involve any or all of the following elements: music’s affinity to language, its development preceding the development of structured language, and its ability to stimulate the pattern recognition, limb movement, emotional regulation, and dopamine releasing regions of our brains, all at once (relatedly, Erik Hoel’s "Enter the Supersensorium" explores why our brains love, and need, literature).
Importantly, music is also a communal activity. Much of my enjoyment comes from the people who love the same music that I do — the ability to delight together in a Mahler symphony or one of Chopin’s nocturnes, and to exchange the moments of immense beauty we discover along the way. Some of my favorite moments from college so far have been attending symphony performances and playing music with friends late into the night. In this way, I see music serving a purpose much like that of the best literature, and really, the best art — breaking down barriers, bringing people together, and allowing us to experience what David Foster Wallace might call “communion.” A part of me wants to let music remain mystical, subrational, and suggestive of some primordial mechanism deeply embedded within all of us, one that exists despite all of our differences.
To end, I want to share five transcendent moments from the classical music canon that have stayed with me over the years. You’ll notice that I tend to favor late Romantic to early twentieth century composers who produced what my friend Noah calls “melodramatic sixties TV music,” but I would argue that these pieces are much more than mere melodrama, and that this overstates how good TV music was in the sixties. I have highlighted one to two minute segments from each piece, but if you find time, I encourage you to listen to them in their entirety. They are all masterworks!
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé (39:48 - 44:54)
The five minute lever du jour scene from Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé is probably the best musical depiction of a sunrise I’ve ever heard. The opening (39:48 - 40:53), a quietly burbling soundscape that gradually awakens as the winds and strings mimic bird calls, and the final ecstatic climax (43:54 - 44:56) are exquisite and impeccably orchestrated.
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5, Movement 2 (16:10 - 17:50)
The second movement of Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony begins with one of the most well-known horn solos in the repertoire: the melody is soulful, gentle, and filled with more than just a little longing.
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3, Movement 2 (23:44 - 25:28)
I was going to highlight the famous conclusion to the second movement of the second concerto (which I’m linking here anyway), but instead I’m focusing on his third concerto, one of the greatest of all time. This excerpt is the emotional peak of the second movement, featuring pianistic fireworks heightened by the lush, impassioned swells of the orchestra. Look out for Yunchan Lim smashing the lowest note of the piano at 24:19.
Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 (3:40 - 4:14)
This passage I’ve highlighted from Bach’s fifth Brandenburg concerto lasts only thirty seconds, but the repeated descents to lower and lower bass notes stretch toward infinity like the endless steps of an Escher painting.
Stravinsky: The Firebird, Finale
The Firebird is the piece that inspired me to write this article (I had a transformative experience watching the Stanford Symphony Orchestra perform it last fall). The finale emerges from the preceding scene of profond ténèbres (profound darkness) with a combination of two elements we’ve seen before: a solo horn, proclaiming the break of dawn. The orchestra steadily grows into a luminous, triumphant, inevitable wall of sound, exorcising all the tension and dissonance built up over the past forty minutes of the piece.