Personal Blogs

The Mystery of Music

Sometimes the most uneventful day can leave us with pleasent memories. Yesterday, I found myself in the Combined Assessment Unit of my local  hospital receiving treatment for an ongoing illness. Before the doctor released me, I observed what the power of music can do. As a woman rushed out of the hospital, she suddenly stopped, turned back, and entered the waiting room where we were all gathered. Kiri Te Kanawa was singing O mio babbino caro by Puccini. For a moment, everything froze. The patients, the staff, the sterile walls of the hospital—all paused as her voice filled the space. Yes, it was music to stop you in your tracks.

Today, on my morning walk, I listened to Gustavo Dudamel on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. I was moved by his enthusiasm as he spoke of the mystery of music, how it moves us in ways we cannot fully explain. Personally, I see no mystery in its essence: it is a gift from the Creator. The mystery, for me, lies elsewhere—in how composers across any genre manage to produce works that endure, that live on far beyond them, carrying an emotional shelf life of centuries.

Dudamel also spoke about his home in Venezuela, where serenade performers still go from house to house, singing beneath windows. It carried me back to a childhood memory of music that was less polished, yet no less unforgettable.

1963: The Incongruity of Self-Awareness
I was seven years old. Every Sunday at 11 a.m., a man would appear round the back of our tenement building. He carried his own stage in the form of a soapbox, wore a bowtie with a donkey jacket, and looked like a music hall artist fallen on hard times. He would swig from a bottle of wine, then launch into Mario Lanza’s Be My Love. The sound rose through the grey closes, spilling into kitchens and living rooms. My mother would listen just long enough before opening her purse, tossing some coins out the window, and muttering, “Why doesn’t that b…. man sing something new?” as she wiped the tears from her eyes.

And yet, even now, I realise he too was part of the mystery. Whether sung in opera houses, broadcast on the radio, or crooned on a street corner by a man with a bottle and a soapbox, music finds a way to reach us, to demand our attention, to remind us we are human.

"You open Your hand

and satisfy the desire of every living thing."

Psalm 145:16 (BSB).

You open your hand,

    and satisfy the desire of every living thing

Image generated with the assistance of copilot

I was only a boy when my music teacher introduced me to the hauntingly beautiful music of Edvard Grieg. It was the kind of music that reaches deep into your soul and stirs something ancient and unnameable. Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, especially Morning and In the Hall of the Mountain King, carried me far away, beyond the confines of the classroom, into a place where mountains stretched endlessly toward the heavens and fjords cut through the earth like jagged wounds of breath-taking beauty. That day, I was struck by a peculiar feeling—a homesickness for Scandinavia, as if I had lived there in some other time. I felt, with an intensity that has stayed with me all my life, that I was born in the wrong country.

The Germans have a word for this: Fernweh. It translates as a kind of homesickness but can have a twist. Instead of pining for a place you've been, it describes a longing for somewhere you've never visited. It's the pull of an unfamiliar land that somehow feels more like home than the ground beneath your feet.

As a boy, I couldn’t have understood Fernweh in such terms, but I felt it keenly. It was as if Grieg’s music unlocked a door within me, leading to a distant, mist-shrouded land I had yet to see but already loved. The ache that came with it was as real as homesickness, a longing so profound that it almost felt like loss. To this day, when I hear Grieg’s compositions, that sensation returns—a yearning for mountains I’ve never climbed, forests I’ve never wandered, and the crisp, cold air of Scandinavia that I’ve never breathed but know in my bones.

This feeling isn’t unique, though it is deeply personal. Whilst reading at the dentist yesterday, I read about the story of Pablo the Penguin from Disney’s The Three Caballeros fascinated me. Pablo, living in the icy expanse of Antarctica, dreams of warmth. He builds a little boat and sails toward the tropics, yearning for sunshine and palm trees. But once he reaches the warm seas of his dreams, something unexpected happens. He feels homesick. He misses the icy winds of Antarctica, the very place he had been so desperate to leave behind.

Pablo’s story resonates with me because it captures the paradox of longing. We yearn for something different, something distant and elusive, and yet, when we reach that place, there’s a chance we might long for the familiarity of where we began. I’ve often wondered if I would feel the same if I lived in Scandinavia. Would my heart still yearn for those fjords and snowy landscapes, or would I find myself pining for the rugged coasts and rolling hills of Scotland?

Like Pablo, I’ve come to understand that homesickness, whether for a place we know or one we imagine, is part of the human experience. It speaks to a deeper truth about us: we are creatures of longing. We seek out beauty, peace, and belonging, sometimes in distant lands or in the melodies of foreign composers. But this longing is often as much about the journey as it is about the destination.

For me, Scandinavia is a place where my soul feels it belongs, even though my body has only been there a few times. The mountains and fjords I dreamed of as a child feel as real to me as my own home. I wonder if this is because there is a part of us, perhaps, that has roots in many places. Some of those roots are nurtured by the landscapes we live in, while others are stirred by the music we hear, the stories we tell, or the dreams we dream. Additionally, my surname is Celtic where a rich history of Scandinavian connection once waved over these landscapes. Who knows if this rich connection is still impeded in our psyche.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s what Fernweh truly is: the recognition that we belong not just to one place, but to many. It is the ache of knowing there are pieces of ourselves scattered across the world, waiting for us to find them, in countries we’ve never visited, in melodies we’ve never heard, and in the hearts of people we’ve yet to meet.

Pablo may have longed for the warmth of the tropics, only to miss the cold of Antarctica, but perhaps that’s the nature of longing itself. It moves us forward, reminding us of the places that call to our souls, while always leaving room for the pull of home—wherever that might be.

My friends and I got to talking about God's future plans. Will faithful humans go to heaven or earth? Could the future Paradise that Jesus spoke of be somewhere that has not been revealed to us yet.? I am not sure. But one thing is sure: we will not be homesick.

You open your hand,

    and satisfy the desire of every living thing.

Psalm 145:16 WEB