I can whistle almost the whole of the Fifth Symphony, all four movements, and with it I have solaced many a whining hour to sleep. It answers all my questions, the noble, mighty thing, it is “green pastures and still waters” to my soul. Indeed, without music I should wish to die.
Edna St. Vincent Millay letter to Allan Ross MacDougall
To imagine existence without music might be biologically possible but it would be emotionally smaller. Music operates on a frequency that bypasses the intellect and speaks directly to something primal within us. Unlike spoken language, which divides us into linguistic communities, music creates a universal grammar of emotion. A minor key can evoke melancholy in a child who has never learned the word “sadness.” A triumphant major chord can lift spirits across cultures, generations, and personal circumstances. This universality suggests that music doesn’t merely accompany human experience—it is woven into the fabric of consciousness itself.
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation. One does not have to know anything about Dido and Aeneas to be moved by her lament for him; anyone who has ever lost someone knows what Dido is expressing. And there is, finally, a deep and mysterious paradox here, for while such music makes one experience pain and grief more intensely, it brings solace and consolation at the same time. (Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain )
When we consider a world stripped of this universal language, we imagine not just silence, but a profound disconnection from our own emotional landscape.
First dances, lullabies, funeral hymns, graduation marches—these melodies become the soundtrack to our most significant moments. They don’t merely accompany these experiences; they preserve them in a form more vivid than photographs, more immediate than written words. A few notes can transport us instantly across decades, reconstructing not just the memory but the emotion of a moment with startling clarity.
Without music, our memories would lose this dimensional quality, the emotional peaks and valleys of our lives would lack their soundtrack, making the landscape of personal history less navigable, less meaningful.
Even beyond its role in significant moments, music provides the rhythm that makes daily existence bearable, even beautiful. Work songs have existed in every culture because they transform labor from mere drudgery into something approaching art. The person who whistles Beethoven during difficult hours understands that music doesn’t change circumstances—it changes our relationship to circumstances. It provides the cadence that makes the unbearable bearable, the monotonous meaningful.
Consider the silence that would replace this constant, subtle soundtrack.
That life without music would not be worth living might initially seem hyperbolic. However, it points to a deeper truth about being human, we don’t merely survive on bread alone—we require beauty, meaning, connection, and transcendence. Music provides all of these simultaneously. It is the art form that most directly addresses our need for both individual expression and communal belonging, for both intellectual stimulation and emotional release.
Life may be technically possible without music, but it would be missing a profound transformation: the ability to turn time into beauty. Music does not change the fact that hours pass, that we suffer, or that we long for what is lost. But it alters how we inhabit those hours, how we carry that suffering, and how we hold on to memory. In this way, music does not merely decorate time — it redeems it. And in that redemption lies its deepest necessity.
If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSICKurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
P.S. I read this today:
As a graduate student, I cared for my grandmother, who was a big fan of Ozzy’s band Black Sabbath herself. Any time we went anywhere, we put on our playlist and sang along. When, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I cut off part of my fingertip and lost access to my campus library, I had Ozzy in my ear for much-needed heavy metal pep talks as I took my PhD qualifying exams.
And when I lost both my grandmother and my California home the following year, I still had Ozzy. His music was the score as I finished my dissertation from my parents’ basement and landed my dream job at Iowa Wesleyan University. Through the submission of my dissertation and driving nearly 1,200 miles across the country to start my new job, I listened to the Blizzard of Ozz album.
Stories from A Closet of Errors 