Music for Every Moment

I was recently at dinner with a non-musician friend who volunteered a short and concise theory on the integration of music and everyday experience. He said “there’s a perfect piece of music for every moment.” It’s a wonderfully direct yet jarring statement, or at least it was for me. In fact, isn’t that little codicil (“for me”) precisely the issue? I am capable of doing what he says, of subjectively evaluating some auditory sensory input in terms of its fit in the moment for me. But wait a second… can such an evaluation be perfected for every moment?

Not dissimilar to Lewis Black’s famed stand-up bit about having overheard a stranger say, “if it was for my horse I wouldn’t have spent that year in college,” my friend’s theory both caught me by surprise and also bored into my ear, lodged itself deep in my brain, and refused to be ignored. A couple questions needed to be asked:

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