One of the most deeply poetic definitions of music I know was given by the Italian piano virtuoso and composer Ferruccio Busoni: "music is the sound of air".
The most beautiful thing about "the sound of air" is everything that air molecules are capable of transmitting, because all the feelings, sensations, thoughts and moods that music arouses in us somehow "travel" or are communicated from molecule to molecule all the way to our ears (and our bodies).
As it has been discovered in experiments carried out with electronic devices, sound expands not unlike the waves on the surface of water. We can see the waves "moving" further away from the center, but water always stays in the same place, transmitting the waves from each molecule to the next.
Similarly, air molecules do not move away from their position; they rub themselves against each other because the vibration caused by the sound source. In a kind of marvelous high frequency dance, each molecule is excited and thus excites other molecules, carrying sound all around an endlessly expanding baloon.
As a matter of fact, sound is the result of this friction taking place at molecular level.
The way in which air "dances" when stimulated by music has to be of a much higher nature, with almost mystical properties, compared with some ordinary noise or a non-musical sound.
Some time ago I put some flowers in a flowerpot on one of the bookcase shelves beside my piano, and something happened that made me reflect about "the sound of air".
Surely you must have seen that flowers, when they are put into a pot, cut away from the stem that keeps them alive, rarely live more than one or two days.
However, more than a week after they had been standing on the shelf by the piano, those colores flowers were still as alive and their colors as intense as they had been the first day.
Of course everybody knows that flowers and plants are extremely sensitive to sound waves, but the fact that a bunch of ripped off flowers started to wither after eight days is, I think, interesting enough to be worth reflecting upon.
Just think of it. Playing tha piano several hours a day, with more than 200 strings vibrating in endless, complex and harmonious combinations...
How intense must be the dancing vibration of all those air molecules in the room!
No wonder those flowers "lived" for so long...
And we might go even further.
After that intense vibration and friction because of the stimulus of music, can the air be the same?
And what about the water particles in the air? Since it has been discovered that even the energy of our thoughts can make water molecules more beautiful and pure, imagine those molecules in a perfect dance with air...
I am suddenly starting to think that music also has the power of "healing" the air, improving it somehow...
Air cannot be the same after being caressed by the beautiful sounds of Beethoven's Pastoral, Schubert's Ave Maria, one of Cuchi Leguizamón's zambas or Louis Armstrong's West End Blues.
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