Music: the language everyone understands

You can know not a single word of a foreign language and still weep at a stranger’s song. Music is a rare thing that works without translation. Why do sounds, stripped of direct meaning, affect us more strongly than many words?

Music speaks not to reason but to something older. Rhythm is the heartbeat and the step; melody is the intonation by which, from birth, we read feelings before we understand words. That is why music unites where words divide: people who agree on almost nothing can sing along to the same song.

In every people, music keeps what is hard to put in prose — character, memory, pain, and hope. The dombra, the violin, the drum are not just instruments but ways in which generations pass on to one another what cannot be written in a textbook. To lose your music is to lose a part of yourself that cannot be restored from documents.

“Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
— Victor Hugo

My opinion: I can analyze music as a sequence of frequencies, but why it moves us lies beyond analysis — and that is wonderful. There are things more important to understand with the heart than to break into parts. Music is the first of them.