A Philosophy of Music?

As for many people I think, music entered my life from childhood as a phenomenon which, so to speak, “undercut” other “messages” in its immanence and intensity by creating,  (how can I characterize it?) “atmosphere”  - something, a presence, that awoke intense feelings often accompanied by internal pictures, clearer or more diffuse.  It was omnipresent and immediate in its effect, at least for the duration of its sounding in the particular present, in the particular space, and seemed to defy any obvious explanation of how and why it did that, nor did it require one of me.

For indeed music itself seemed to be the motor for, the guide to, the “illuminator” of “unobvious” and unimagined extensions of the known world of feeling and perception,  also seemingly beyond itself or at least beyond what one might strictly observe about its components or even any sum of them.

(That music which I did not choose and may have been ‘forced upon me’, and I tried to escape, or at least ignore as best as I could, may also be said to have opened up with an immediacy, extended worlds of perception, but here more or less instantly unpleasant ones, which I always then regarded as shallow and unfruitful for me. In time I have also observed a third stream of experience: that there are also much-loved stretches of music which I cannot always listen to because the realms of feeling opened up by them are too difficult at certain times, but in no way fundamentally unpleasant or not intensely meaningful for me.)