Thanks csteele for telling us your favourites.

I don’t mind old Leonard Cohen. But I particularly like K D Lang’s version of his Hallelujah.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XyKZcvLqmk&feature=related

As for your other favourite. Yeah… I’ll um… have to work on it. But then that is the intensely personal nature of music, as Pericles asserts.

Hi Ludwig, music becomes fundamental, (a staple of the diet) to those who make music as much as it does for those whom listen and enjoy music.

Music phrases offer the colour of emotions without lyric, good music is capable of transporting the listener emotionally, even too other times and places.

The Peer Gynt Suite (Peter and the Wolf) of classical music fame is the most obvious example I can think of this at the moment. The point I make is that music notation timing phrasing etc transcends mere language and takes a universal form.

Music is capable of communicating something personal too all of us individually and too all of us simultaneously. A universal language that we all understand.

I guess you can tell by now that music means a lot to me Ludwig, thanks for your post.

Here’s another favourite, especially for me ol’ mate Hasbeen:

http://youtu.be/Dmq7gA1S9KI

For me it is not whether music is good or bad, but the context.

Peer Gynt for me is school days, high school musicals, & great memories, as much as music.

I can not hear Hawaiian guitar music without being transported to tropical islands in a turquoise ocean, & thoughts of the people I shared them with.

Harry Belafonte takes me back to beach bar-b-ques, at Easter & Christmas in Broken Bay with great friends.

Other music takes me back to love affairs, long ago, can raise the hairs on the back of my neck & bring on melancholy, that I will never see those times or people, again. It can bring on thoughts of what might have been, best left alone.

Often it makes me wish my neighbours could not afford such a powerful stereo system.

Yes, what is it about music that so many of us have got on-line at the mere title of this thread: "Music" ?

Pericles has got it right (and not just about wombats) that music - for many of us - can mean more than art, or drama, or even a good book. Even just today, I've got off on Mozart's 39th, a bit of Dvorak, and a Brahms piano recital just finished on the wireless and a bit of Wagner has just started. I'm not all that partial to Wagner, of course, the music of fascism, but you have to take the rough with the smooth.

I'm in a couple of Sing Australia choirs (check them out on http://www.singaustralia.com.au/ for one near you) and last night we belted out "Love Me With All Your Heart" and "Men of Harlech" and "We're Walking In The Air" and a couple of dozen other songs of all sorts. Exhausting but just fantastic: music, either listening to it or doing it, really does kick up the dopamine level.

Isn't it amazing that most of us can recognise thousands of tunes, even remember the words of songs we haven't heard for decades ? Where would we be without our music ? Yeah, some music is almost as good as sex.

Well, someone had to say it :)

Fighting words Ludwig.

Drop in some time, & I'll take you on at a lap of Bathurst, the Coral Sea, or the bedroom, any time. I'll provide the cars, you provide the Ladies.