Recently, we watched "Strangers in Good Company", a Canadian movie that ranks as one of Lynn's very favorites. You could certainly call it a contemplative and reflective film. A group of elderly women are stranded when their bus breaks down. They have time to consider their lives and remember various things that have happened to them at one point or another. The sound track includes some wonderful music, both popular songs from their youth, such as "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" and classical music, such as the glorious adagio from Schubert's opus 163 (D956).
The Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and Cimarosa parts are indeed wonderful. That haunting, hypnotizing and very soothing adagio has been part of many soundtracks I have heard. It is available in many versions on YouTube such as this one by the Julliard String Quartet and Bernard Greenhouse. I hadn't heard that music for quite a while and I had forgotten about it.
Just about a year ago, I read "The Universal Sense" by Prof. Seth Horowitz. I have a hearing loss and Horowitz is a scientist who deals with sound and neurology. That book led me to the book "Healing at the Speed of Sound". Ever since those books, I have been extra conscious of the sounds surrounding me. There are always things in the environment that are vibrating in one way or another. My heart, my joints as they move, my breathing and my swallowing all make sounds but I usually can't hear them or I ignore them.
In today's world of recorded sounds that can be mechanically reproduced and modified, enhanced and combined, there is nearly always some sound or music that is audible or could be with a button press. When I hear that sounds and music can affect me deeply, I have my doubts until I remember being stirred by a march, frightened by a creepy soundtrack or strengthened by the words "I love you".
