The musical brain : what students, teachers, and performers need to know

Abstract

For centuries, poets and philosophers have written about the power of music, often suggesting that music is the essence of life itself, that music lives within us, that we are music. Scientists have dismissed these writings as flights of poetic fancy, or perhaps metaphor or artistic license. They have considered music to be a product of culture, and that's the way musicians have studied music as well. But have poets and philosophers perhaps had a better sense of the true nature of music? Have they been right all along in suggesting that music is life itself?