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Music and Memory: The Impression of the Soul

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Franz Liszt once said "Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words. If music has one advantage over the other media through which a person can represent the impressions of the soul, it owes this to its supreme capacity to make each inner impulse audible without the assistance of reason. Reason, after all, is restricted in the diversity of its means and is capable only of confirming or describing our affections, not of communicating them directly in their full intensity. To accomplish this even approximately, reason must search for images and comparisons. Music, on the other hand, presents at once the intensity and the expression of feeling. It is the embodied and intelligible essence of feeling, capable of being apprehended by our senses. It permeates them like a dart, like a ray, like a mist, like a spirit, and fills our soul." Music has been passed down from generation to generation to show an audience beauty and associate with their emotions. My violin teacher Brunilda Myftaraj once stated that I could play violin all day without ending and I would feel empty, she advised that unless I connect with my audience than the music I’m playing has no exquisiteness and means nothing to no-one. My teacher said a respectable performance is one in which the audience is drawn into the beauty of the playing and adores the music so much that they effortlessly remember the music

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