INTRODUCTION 

A few days back, as the intern was working on my violin, the luthier and I, in the process of sharing a pot of home-brewed Earl Grey and oven-baked cookies between us, started talking. We touched almost every issue on earth, everything that comes up when two people related by music(only) sit for an hour with a pot of home-brewed Earl Grey and oven-baked cookies between them. 

He seemed worried about the way parents remove their wards from music classes for three to four months per annum on the pretext of the impending exams. The child is getting too stressed, says the distraught parent; he needs to put in more time for his studies. 

The luthier here said something I will never forget. He said it quite casually, almost jokingly, the way the greatest truths of the world are uttered without after-effects, filters, or AI manipulations. 

He said, to reduce stress, they are taking away the one thing that reduces stress the most. 

Yes, I thought, helping myself to the last couple of cookies, we probably are detaching the oxygen cylinder from the deep-sea diver, so he can swim better! 

What is Music & Why It Matters 

LET US MAKE MUSIC 

‘Everybody has a song, everybody can sing…’ so says the song. We will soon see why. And how! Those of you who think that music is not your cup of tea, that God has somehow skipped through that section of the manufacturing booklet that came with you, and only venture to give your vocal cords a try at the camouflage of the shower, may do the following experiment with yourself. Be perfectly at peace, we are working with your sanity, and we are going to return it to you the moment this game of music-making is done. 

Now, say La - La - La- La, or Ding - Dong- Ding - Dong, or whatever suits you the best. Say it naturally, without haste and not yawning. 

Take the first La, change its pitch. Elongate the second La a bit. Reduce the pitch of the third La, and reduce the time span of the fourth La, and also change its pitch. Sing it several times. That’s awesome!! Now, you have created MUSIC. In a crude form, yet it's a new music made by you, and you only !!! 

It may be pleasant, or it may not. But now that you have made a group of interconnected sounds or notes, you have created music. 

This was how the first music was born, even before language took shape. A call to hunt, or discovering a river nearby, a lullaby without words, a serenade of emotions. Even now, it is the tone, or tune, of the speaker that determines the meaning more than the exact words. A simple “Nothing!” answered to a simpler “What’s the matter?” denotes a load of things if you can adequately decipher the tone. It needs experience, though! 

So now, we have understood how little pebbles of sounds, when changed and arranged in an understandable and defined way, produce gems of music. 

Let us be serious for a little while (because the moment you induce gravity in music, it tends to follow the example of Huckleberry Finn) and excavate a little into the history books. 

The earliest documented music is mostly concerned with divinity. The oldest documented music in the East is the Hurrian Hymn No. 6 (also known as the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal or H6), dating back to approximately 1400 BCE. Discovered in the 1950s in the ancient city of Ugarit (modern-day Syria), these clay tablets contain lyrics and musical notation, making it the oldest substantially complete musical work in the world. 

Both in the Orient and in the West, the early humans devoted their musical ability mostly to please the Gods. We are not sure about how much the Gods loved the presentation, but we can be sure about how the humans loved to sing them. The biggest proof is the amount of music we play during any of our festivals, and the volumes of hymns, chants, and bhajans we sing at our worship.  We shall keep this point underlined in red for future reference. 

THE EVOLUTION 

Slowly, music made its way into other spheres of life. Songs of revolutions, ballades of moonlight, serenades of aching hearts, and refrains of bonfires… it evolved through the ages. These songs have been sung thousands of times… by the simple layman, the peasant, the blacksmith, the vagabond, the soldier, the hunter and the hunted… ordinary people who lived one day, and died, and nobody remembers them now, no history textbook speaks about them… but relentlessly carried the music through the deluge, the wars, the famine and through the inevitable parade of deaths.. The words, sometimes the tune itself, have been modulated, moulded according to the occasion and the dexterity of the singer/ singers. But the main theme lingers. 

Everything on earth, i.e., almost everything, has two basic modes of functioning- the utilitarian mode and the ornamental mode. 

One simple example will illustrate the idea (and will definitely raise more questions than answers), still, here goes the example:- 

You make a cup. (Wow!) You can drink Earl Grey( my fav) from it, or mix lemon, honey, and lukewarm water to take care of your fat, or so to say, anything that can be drunk from it. That is the utilitarian function of the cup. 

You change the shape of the cup (suppose you can do that without breaking it), paint some flowers and leaves that don’t actually match with each other, anyway, and it becomes a work of art! Now you place it on the TV cabinet, or in some place where it would be impossible for the guests to miss it, and you stare at it for hours from various angles and pat yourself for being such a creative being! You dare not drink from it, neither Earl Grey nor that lemon-honey mix, and the housemaid is restrained from dusting anything within twenty-three yards of the sculpture that was once a cup. That good old innocent cup is transported to the realm of a glorified mode of art and ecstasy. 

Similarly, music, too, like Schrodinger’s cat, is both utilitarian and artistic at the same time.

At the very beginning of civilization, music was more a form of information. And a mode of conveyance of adoration and prayer to the Almighty. However atheistically inclines we may be today, in those internetless days, prayers and hymns were as important as Instagram is today. So, music was mostly utilized for a cause. 

The cup overflowed and music ventured in alleys away from the alter. Newer ideas bloomed, newer thoughts took the stage. Music  shed its cloak of piousness, and hold the hand of the common man, lovingly. Here, it turned itself into art… something that does not promise a profit, but something you can not stop yourself from being dragged into, like popcorns in the theatre! 

Not all music remains. Not every composition survives. In our next episode we will find out why we go back to some definite pieces of music over and over again, like returning home, to the rickety chair and the old glass of Earl Grey on the porch. 

Till then, keep singing your own original composition,  La La La La… 

Episode :2 (Published on 3rd July 2026)

(…a second cup of Earl Grey… Her Highness, and the cat!)

Why Some Music Lives Forever

Now, as promised, let us return to that rickety porch chair, with the old glass of Earl Grey, and ask ourselves a question that has been sitting quietly in the corner of the room all this while, like a cat that knows it is eventually going to be noticed.

It is a curious thing about music, and I have thought about it a great deal, particularly during those long evenings when I have nothing better to do and Her Highness is not available to distract me with some new and catastrophic scheme involving the basin of plates and cups — those irreplaceable treasures of the kitchen, regarded by their custodians with a reverence usually reserved for holy relics and maiden aunts, and treated by the laws of physics with a contempt that borders on the personal. They are brittle to the touch, slippery as an eel, and possessed of an unerring instinct for the hardest available floor.

As I was saying, some music, you see, refuses to die.

I do not mean this in the ghostly sense, though I confess there are certain tunes — the kind one's aunt plays on the harmonium after Sunday dinner — that haunt a man with a persistence no self-respecting ghost would consider tasteful. I mean it in the rather more cheerful sense that certain compositions, written hundreds or even thousands of years ago by people who have long since ceased to worry about anything at all, continue to make the rest of us feel things we cannot quite explain and would probably be embarrassed to admit to in polite company.

Why does some music never fade?

Think about it. You have music from a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago — some fragments, barely surviving the floods and the fires of history — and yet, when played, they reach into the chest and pull something out of you. Something you weren't even aware was sitting there (like the cat who invited herself for the snack). Meanwhile, there are songs released last Tuesday that you cannot remember by Wednesday morning.

What gives?

Her Highness said, when I raised this point with her one evening, that it was simply a matter of fashion, and that all music eventually died out, like giant stars and the belief that a good thick muffler could prevent a cold. I told Her Highness this was nonsense. She said she (Her Highness) was fairly certain it wasn't. We compromised, as Her Highness and I often do, by letting the matter rest and having some more Earl Grey.

But I knew I was right... (The cat knew I was right. And between the two of us, I felt, we constituted a reasonable majority.) I usually am, in the long run, though the long run has an inconvenient habit of arriving after everyone has stopped paying attention.

The answer wonderfully, has less to do with genius and more to do with mathematics. I say wonderfully because I have always found it quietly reassuring that the great mysteries of human experience turn out, at bottom, to be sums. It suggests the universe is, at heart, a tidy sort of place, even if my study gives no indication of this whatsoever.

I should warn you at this point not to go anywhere. The Earl Grey is still warm, the cat is arranged in the doorway with an expression of cautious optimism, and we are just getting to the interesting part. Though I have found, in my experience, that people have a tendency to wander off precisely when things are about to become worth staying for. 

Music is, at its most fundamental, a collection of frequencies — sound waves, dancing in patterns. Your ear receives them, your brain processes them, and somewhere in the middle of all that electrical business, you feel something. But here is the beautiful secret: your brain is not a passive receiver. It is, if you will permit me the comparison, an extraordinarily opinionated self-invited cat. It has preferences. It likes certain arrangements and recoils from others.

Some patterns feel natural. Some create a sense of balance, of rightness, the way a well-placed full stop after a long sentence does. Some are simply, almost stubbornly, easy to remember.

Let us think of it this way. Imagine a classroom. A well-arranged classroom — desks in sensible rows, the blackboard clearly visible, light falling without casting shadows on your notebook — is a place where you can breathe, think, and focus. Now imagine the same classroom after a cyclone has passed through it. Same number of desks, same blackboard, same light. But now everything is where it shouldn't be. Chaos. Your brain, instead of learning, spends all its energy just navigating the room.

Music works exactly the same way.

Notes that are mathematically related to each other — in simple, clean ratios — sound harmonious. They fit together the way a well-made dovetail joint fits, without glue, without force, simply because the proportions are right. Notes thrown together without this underlying balance sound, to put it plainly, like that post-cyclone classroom.

This idea — of studying how patterns and relationships between notes create emotional and aesthetic impact — is what musicologists have long analysed, and what a framework like Schenkerian Analysis attempts to unpack. In simplified terms, it asks: what makes a particular arrangement of notes feel perfect? Why does one combination make you sit up straighter, and another make you want to weep into your Earl Grey?

Schenkerian Analysis — and I ask you to note the spelling carefully, as I myself have misspelled it on three separate occasions this morning and am not entirely confident I have it right even now — is a method of musical analysis developed by the Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker, who was born in 1868 and spent a considerable portion of his subsequent years on earth being more serious about music than most of us manage to be about anything.

His central argument — and it is, when you get to the bottom of it, a rather magnificent one — is that every great piece of tonal music, however complicated it may appear on the surface, is secretly, underneath all the fuss, a single primal two-part structure. He called this the Ursatz, which is German, and means approximately what it sounds like if you say it aloud in a railway carriage and observe the expressions of your fellow passengers. The cat, when I said it aloud experimentally one afternoon, opened one eye, considered the matter, and closed it again. I took this as provisional acceptance.

To arrive at this underlying structure, Schenker proposed that music be understood in three layers, like a particularly ambitious architectural cake.

The first layer is the Foreground — the actual music as written. All the notes, the decorations, the trills, the elaborate little flourishes that the composer spent the best years of his life perfecting and which the pianist in the flat across appears to have decided are entirely optional. This is the surface. This is what you hear.

The second layer is the Middleground. To reach it, one performs a process called reduction, which involves peeling away the decorative notes — with the careful, methodical air of a man removing the icing from a cake in order to examine the sponge beneath, and trying very hard not to eat the icing in the process. What remains reveals the essential melodic paths, the underlying harmonies, the structural skeleton of the thing. Though this process needs some kind of technical knowledge on the part of a human, the cat understands reduction instinctively. She has, over the years, reduced my armchair to its essential structural components through a process I can only describe as enthusiastic and ongoing, and what remains is, if nothing else, the Middleground of a chair.

The third and deepest layer is the Background — the Ursatz itself. The bare bones. The primal framework upon which the entire magnificent edifice has been constructed. Schenker's remarkable claim was that every masterpiece, from the grandest symphony to the most delicate sonata, rests, at its very foundation, on this single simple structure.

Her Highness, when I explained all this to her, said it sounded like a great deal of work for very little music. I told her that was rather the point — that the greatness of the music lay precisely in the distance between that bare foundation and the breathtaking complexity built upon it. The further the journey from the Ursatz to the Foreground, the richer and more extraordinary the piece.

The music that survives centuries is music that found these patterns — intuitively, by design, or by the sheer good fortune of a gifted composer having an extraordinarily good day — and wove them into something that the human brain cannot quite let go of. It feels, to the listener, less like something learned and more like something remembered. Something you knew before you knew it.

That is why some music feels like coming home.

The Mozart Effect

Now, speaking of coming home — or rather, of helping your brain perform at its very best — let us talk about one of the most famous (and, I confess, most entertainingly misunderstood) ideas in the world of music and science.

The Mozart Effect.

The Mozart Effect — which sounds, I always think, like something you might order at a Continental café without being entirely sure what it contains — is the theory that listening to the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart can temporarily improve one's concentration, sharpen the memory, and generally encourage the brain to behave in a more cooperative and industrious fashion than it might otherwise choose to do.

In the early 1990s, this particular discovery was made, and once it escaped the laboratory and reached the public, it promptly set off a frenzy of well-meaning parents playing violin concertos to their houseplants, their newborns, and — in at least one documented case I fully believe exists — their goldfish.

The theory, at its core, is this: listening to certain kinds of music — particularly classical compositions, and particularly those of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — can temporarily improve concentration, sharpen memory, and give the brain a gentle but effective boost.

Students who listened to calm classical music before attempting tasks, studies suggested, solved spatial puzzles faster and focused with greater ease. The brain, it seemed, was being warmed up, primed, tuned — the way a musician runs scales before a performance, or the way you might stretch before a match, if you are the kind of person who plays basketball (I admire you from a distance, over my Earl Grey).

Why should Mozart, specifically, produce this effect?

Because his compositions possess something that our brains find deeply agreeable — they are structured without being rigid, balanced without being boring. They maintain a symmetry and an internal logic that stimulates the mind gently, without overwhelming it. It is the musical equivalent of a conversation with a brilliant friend who is also, crucially, a wonderful listener. You come away from it feeling sharper, clearer, more yourself.

Now, before we crown Mozart the official patron saint of examination halls and install his bust above every school library door, a word of honesty is warranted. The Mozart Effect, as research has subsequently clarified, is real but modest. The improvement in performance it produces is temporary. It is not a magic elixir. It is not a substitute for sleep, for practice, for the patient, daily business of learning.

Think of it as a particularly good cup of Earl Grey before you sit down to work — it helps, genuinely, but it does not write the essay for you.

The cat, I have observed, becomes subtly more alert during Mozart. Not in the frantic, indiscriminate way she becomes alert when the tin opener is produced, nor in the wary, affronted way she becomes alert when it is the violin downstairs. It is a quieter alertness. A dignified one. She sits a little straighter. Her eyes, habitually half-closed in the manner of one who has seen everything worth seeing and found most of it adequate, open a fraction wider. She is, in these moments, a better version of herself, which I mention not to overstate the case for Mozart, but because I have never seen oven-baked-fish produce the same result, and oven-baked-fish is, in most other respects, quite formidable.

The deeper point — which Her Highness, excellent human being, occasionally misses — is not the temporary boost in puzzle-solving performance. It is the extraordinary, ancient, and still not entirely explained fact that music does something to the human mind that nothing else quite manages. That it has always done this. That it did this before we had words for it, before we had theories about it, before anyone had thought to name it or study it or write slightly self-important books about it.

We made sounds in the dark, thousands of years ago, because something in us needed to. Because the sounds arranged themselves into patterns. Because the patterns felt, in some way we could not have explained at the time and can only partly explain now, like the right thing to do.

And we have been at it ever since. Humming to ourselves. Whistling on staircases. Playing the violin, in the flat below, at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday evening.

Some of us more tunefully than others.

Which, as it happens, is precisely where our next chapter begins.

La La La La — keep singing, dear reader. We have barely started.

Written by : Dibyojyoti Biswas (Faculty, Birla High School)