When my mother was much younger maybe in her 60’s I used to notice her busy doing a project, then all of a sudden a song would come on the radio. Her stoic feet would begin to tap, her backside would sway and before long , she would break into a joyous dance. Music can gives us chills, make us cry and sooth our hearts. Studies done at the University of London by Nidhya Logeswaran and Joydeep Bhattacharya proved that music may make us see visual images differently, happy music was shown to cause people to view visual images as happier, and sad music wrote a visual story of a sadder nature. A quote from their study, ” music is exquisitely emotionally evocative”- almost as if music contains some distinctly human elements. Music repatriation goes back to an early “seventeenth century usage applied to living bodies. Repatriation itself is derived from Latin which means” back to one’s fatherland”.(Gunderson, F, and Woods, B. “Handbook of Musical Repatriation”.

What is a human element of music? One is our expressive speech, which may be just as abstract as the diversity of language throughout different cultures. However, most of the emotion of language is in the meaning which is different from culture to culture. Knowing how much my mom loved music , she would have most likely kicked up her feet to drums from any country. I love the hit Linda Ronstadt recorded, Different Drummer. The first line says “You and I travel to the beat of a different drum, Ah can’t you tell by the way I run every time you make eyes at me……” We may not all celebrate music in the same language or with the same emotions, but music expresses something human that each of us may find refreshing in many different ways. This post is dedicated to my mother who was the reason music is in our family.