# Classical Music as Self Medication



## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

I've been receiving my Christmas holiday orders of CDs in the last few days, and as I brought a big stack into work to rip on my office computer's CD-ROM drive, I thought to myself: this is my new batch of medication.

I will refrain from detailing why in order to forestall conflict, but suffice it to say that The World has me reaching for methods of psychological analgesia, and classical music is it.

So my latest batch is this:





































It's a lot of music to be sure. I am listening to it all, as this is how the medicine is most effective. I do worry that the purchasing is just as much the endorphin hit, though.

Does anyone else use CM to medicate themselves? If so, what have been your most effective strategies/choices/prescriptions?


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

I will cop to there having been a few jazz platters in the mix, too. Brubeck, Coltrane and Monk among them


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## Helgi (Dec 27, 2019)

Absolutely. For me it has an overall elevating effect, similar to poetry but even more effective.

And there's an inverse relationship between the tone of the music and how it makes me feel; the more morbid and melancholy the better.

Which is why I greeted the new year with a funeral mass :angel:


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

There have been times when listening to some music has helped me out of doldrums. But most of my listening has not been therapeutic. It is just for enjoyment. I _need _music in my life but not because I would be unwell or miserable without it. I know this because I used to travel a lot and would sometimes go months with no music at all and yet without ill effects. Perhaps I have enough music in me.

On the other hand, why would I give up music? It is an important part of my life and of me.


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## flamencosketches (Jan 4, 2019)

I agree that music is a useful self-medication and I sometimes will completely zone out into it, essentially completely forgetting whatever it is that ails me at the time. That being said, _buying_ music is an addictive drug, especially buying music online. It's a dopamine kick when you click the "buy" button and it's another, slightly bigger dopamine kick when the package shows up at your door with the new music. It's sickening, when I think about it, but I am in deep. One might say that constantly seeking out new music and seeking continuous novelty is an addiction of its own, but that's not something I'm willing to give up at this point in my life (see the other recent thread about not music and the insufficiency of time to listening to it all). In short, yes, music is therapeutic, but much like more chemical varieties of therapy, it can be addictive when wielded improperly. But at least one can't OD on it.


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Listening to Gruppen, and other weird stuff takes my mind off my pain.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

The nineties were a particularly depressing time for me: my mother died from cancer at age 64, my career prospects looked dim, and I simply could not find that special someone in my life. Music is what kept me going.

Fortunately in 1999 I got a big promotion, was given the challenging task to start up and head a new research centre in Singapore, and met a beautiful artist who has been my wife now for almost 20 years already.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Helgi said:


> Absolutely. For me it has an overall elevating effect, similar to poetry but even more effective.
> 
> And there's an inverse relationship between the tone of the music and how it makes me feel; the more morbid and melancholy the better.
> 
> Which is why I greeted the new year with a funeral mass :angel:


Musical homeopathy?


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## philoctetes (Jun 15, 2017)

It's possible that I am "deep listening" only about 1/4 of the time that I have music playing, maybe less. This time of year the silence of empty redwoods is a blessing so music is just an accessory sometimes.

Collecting music - not pursuing it - has worn me down to almost giving up. I've clung to CDs because I can hear the difference in sound quality from mp3s, I like having something physical, and I even think of CDs as backups for files and not the other way around. But I spend too much time organizing my collection in the small space of my home, and I imagine my heirs someday looking at my CD collection and shaking their heads just like I do. So I've traded off about 1/3 of my collection to Amoeba over the last year. 

This process is part of the larger, common process I'm going through of "sizing down" as I get older. I also enjoy going to Amoeba as I've been a visitor to that building since it was a bowling alley and it's always an adventure - not always pleasant - to walk on Haight St... for me their jazz section is rich and classical is not bad... so recently the rush of acquiring music is overshadowed by the physical burden of plastic accumulation... I've decided, as always, to maintain a collection of a certain size, but I'm trying to bring that maximum limit down to a lower minimum. As long as it's painless and brings fresh music to the ears, the limit will keep dropping.

And oddly enough, when my collection of files and CDs doesn't have what I want to hear at the moment, I actually get a similar "rush" when I open up Spotify and realize I can simply start searching their library for something I haven't heard before.... trading off plastic and material excess for cooling fans and heat exhaust at the server farm...

Wondering also if the thread title could have been music "with" self-medication... ha


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Not being capable of full-throated praise of humankind, I appreciate music for its ability to generally embody the least harmful, most amiable and benevolent impulses of the species, as well as appreciating it for its direct personal psychological/medicinal benefits. Actually, the first-mentioned aspect is a large part of the second. The same might be said of mathematics, and of "pure" scientific inquiry. All three serve to both center and uncenter ourselves, achieving a balance that can sustain one through dark times. The poet Robinson Jeffers once observed that the human mind required being affixed to a metaphorical mental flywheel to steady and regulate its function and keep it from flying apart. Music can, at least in part, serve as such.


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## Guest (Jan 10, 2020)

I view listening deeply to music as a sort of meditation. It allows the mind to forget prosaic everyday problems and relax. It is as necessary as sleep to me.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

I discovered classical music at an early age and found it to be not so much medication as a glorious alternative to what other people called real life. Figuring out how to deal with the latter takes a lifetime, and it's a process full of randomness, happenstance, disappointment, and time wasted on trivia and the increasing battle with entropy. Music, meanwhile, is always there, an ideal realm in which life is contained and sublimated, exquisitely structured so that every moment counts and mortality is for a few blissful moments suspended. 

Escapism gets a bad press. I'm all for it.


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

Strange Magic said:


> Not being capable of full-throated praise of humankind, I appreciate music for its ability to generally embody the least harmful, most amiable and benevolent impulses of the species...


I like this. Classical Music helps me to remember, amidst the cavalcade of misery and stupidity that constitutes the news of the day, that humans are capable of creating beauty and goodness. And then there is the therapeutic temporal distraction/meditative quality mentioned by others.


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## Helgi (Dec 27, 2019)

Woodduck said:


> Musical homeopathy?


Haha, could be. But I don't think there's anything wrong with me though!


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

Woodduck said:


> Escapism gets a bad press. I'm all for it.


It's been my major preoccupation since childhood. Of course we must be responsible enough to engage with the world on the minimum level required to survive and pay the bills. But I never had any money hungry ambitions to go in to business and be somebody. Some good books and music have satisfied me throughout my life and will continue to do so.


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## Olias (Nov 18, 2010)

For me, Haydn symphonies are like a happy pill of endorphins. I think it has to do with the perfect combination of classical form and order, musical humor, and the cheery, accessible characteristics of the majority of Haydn's work.


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

Olias said:


> For me, Haydn symphonies are like a happy pill of endorphins. I think it has to do with the perfect combination of classical form and order, musical humor, and the cheery, accessible characteristics of the majority of Haydn's work.


Haydn has definitely been an analgesic for me of late. I'm quite enjoying the Fischer set (I'm in the 30s now) and Karajan's digital Haydn gives me that sweet-sweet BPO sound.


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