Music as Life?

In the first three years I was at medical school I spent much of each day learning to be a doctor; but my other major activity was music - mainly classical, but some folk. 

At times it was almost as if I lived 'in' music. It was not just that I listened (with intense attention) to a great deal of music; and sang in Gilbert and Sullivan shows and two choirs (one large, the other of twelve singers) -- but more than this, I was seeking something spiritually absorbing from music. 

In a way, I was expecting to find in music some-thing that would be the main thing in life; would 'solve' the problems of life. 

When I was working on learning something like Beethoven's Piano Concertos, or Sonatas; Bach performed by Glenn Gould; Wagner's Ring operas; Richard Strauss's tone poems; or the works of Michael Tippett (which was as modern as I got) -- I was seeking for something that I felt lacking.

Several times, I seemed to be close to getting it. For example; the four consecutive days spent listing to The Ring while reading the musical scores - and talking or reading about The Ring when I was not listening - were so intense and immersive that the effect lasted for weeks. I seemed to be (wanted to be) living inside Wagner's world, and everything reminded me of some aspect.    

Or the music of Michael Tippet (by my evaluation, the best living English composer) which began with buying his Double String Concerto (as an accidental pairing with Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia), then reading his Moving Into Aquarius essays (found in a shop in Athens!); and ended with being taken through everything of his that had been recorded up to 1980 by a music-student friend who had also known Tippett somewhat, since he was a neighbour in Wiltshire. 

The culmination was meeting Tippett himself, outside his house, to hand over a 75th Birthday card; and again at the birthday concert in his honour - at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. 

As I came back from this concert on the train, travelling from midnight to 05:00 (to attend ward rounds the next morning); while reading the newly published short biography and analysis by David Matthews -- the combination of excitement and lack of sleep probably raised my 'life in music' to about as high and sustained a level as was possible... 

Which was not all that complete or sustained - if 'life' was the true objective! Music never quite delivered on my hopes, even at its best; and I always felt the need for other things - my medical work, literature, and (of course) human society. Yet even when all this were put-together, it did not answer. Always there was a lack - hence the continual hoping and searching. 

While it is true that I continued to pin (unrealistically) great hopes on music for another several years (one way or another) - as much for lack of any better alternative as because the life-strategy was working well - I never reached so broad and deep an involvement as at around that time.

Looking back I regard my quest in music as a recapitulation of something that happened more generally in post-Christian Western society - the impulse of non-Christian Romanticism which sought to replace and supersede religion with art. This is the core meaning of 'art of art's sake'. 

Beethoven or Wagner could serve as good musical examples - not least because towards the end of his life Wagner