What Good Is Music?: A Response to Leo Rangell

The author has spent almost every day of his life intimately involved with music since he began studying the violin at age seven. Yet even though the powerful impact of music on most people is clear, a basic question remained unanswered for the author into his seventh decade on a concert stage: Why is music so meaningful? Then came September 11, 2001, and with it a strong sense of what the answer might be. This two-part paper begins with a response to the paper by Leo Rangell that reflects on the power of music over our everyday lives, the effect of its absence, and its connection to other essentials of the human experience, among them speech and dancing. It then proceeds to tell the story of how music helped the author through the great American tragedy of a terrorist attack.