Interlude: Deathbed music

Deathbed music will obviously be personal, stirred from deep within one’s whole life. So I can’t recommend anything to you. Hopefully with a good twenty or thirty years left, I yet have no idea what I would choose. One of my problems is that I will always remain intimately aware of my inner child, which occupies most of my being. That makes it fairly likely that in my last minutes I’ll want to hear a simple and sweet piece, like Grieg’s Cradle Song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnCRfoF6-Pw) or Wedding Recessional March (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRE16QaKFp0). If, however, I’m resting in my adult self which has hopefully, by the factor of time, become real, I may want a Bach Chorale Prelude (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fhqqxEQRRY) or Chopin’s second (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wslm1ZL9EI8) or fourth Ballade (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdQsHN4MvIM).

Musicians, it makes sense they would want to have music at their end. They are certain it is the meaning and purpose of life. (I’m sure many of the old-time geniuses believed this, and were quite rhapsodic about it.) However, as a deconstructionist psychotherapist, I have a hard time differentiating between music as elevation and music as masturbation. I hope that in my final moments I’ll just live life and enjoy the magic of music, which is possibly the door to God, wherever he is hiding.

But really, don’t we have to admit that music just tickles us? It fools us into feeling there is Meaning in the universe. It fools us into believing dumbish thoughts are important. Read the lyrics – without the music – of most of the rock ‘n’ roll songs of the fifties, sixties, seventies (that’s when I stopped listening). You read or recite them, it’s pathetic. You sing them and you are deep in the gears of creation.

Actually, when on my deathbed, I intend to get up, leave the house (or Home), breathe deep, fill my eyes again (that is, hopefully not for the first time) and walk ’til I disappear. No music.

World without music – that’s the real deep.

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Yes, I know this is an odd subject. But I recall from my youth, immersed in classical music, that some of the great composers in their last hours asked to hear a certain piece of music. Chopin, if I’m correct, requested Mozart’s Requiem. As they didn’t have record players back then, I have no good idea how this was accomplished.