There is a particular Bach fugue that I like to practice (I am a keyboard artist) to the mental rhythm of “I love you, (wife’s name)”. It works for me, as a kind of meditation. I leave out the exact identifications here, of both the fugue and my wife, as that sort of thing is different for every musician/husband, artist/wife, plumber/partner, et al.
“Music, as the beauty of sound, proceeds from a transcendental affirmation that is beyond all self-hood. Music in nature does not differ, in any essential way, from music in art. The thrush and the nightingale, the bull, the stallion and the lion are all artists re-creating in sound the cosmic affirmation which brought them into existence. From the time that earth first received its atmosphere, the music of wind and waves was there, a thousand million years before life had ears to hear it.” – an excerpt from “The Dramatic Universe” by J.G. Bennett (Vol III, p. 112)
David Salminen 