If Music Be the Food of Love…

By John Hills | Published in Context, the magazine for family therapy and systemic practice, February 2004, no 71.

From the Introduction…

Writing about music is condemned as being as difficult as writing about a therapy session, art exhibition or play. A word -based narrative is a flat, one-dimensional description of the total of sense experience at which music engages us. Ideally, you should be reading this listening to a piece of music which has meaning for you (and don’t believe for a moment you cannot think of one!)

Like most of us, music has always been an important, vital part of my life. I perform it from time to time, playing the blues harmonica. However, it is as a listener that music entered my life in childhood and entwined itself in a subtle filigree the length of my life providing as potent an attachment as my family relationships and friendships! It has, in that cliche of American ‘therapspeak’, ‘always been there for me’, unconditional, undemanding, infinitely responsive and able, mostly, to soothe the despairs and sorrows that human existence sets about us and raise up the celebratory, life-enhancing, passion of rhythm and excitement.
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