The following files all contain music. You will need Netscape3.0 to hear these files. If you are running Netscape 2.0 you willneed todownloadQuick-Time Plug-in for Macintosh or Windows 95.

Handel, Water Music,composed 1717

Vivaldi, Four Seasons,composed 1725

Bach, BrandenburyConcertos, composed 1718-1721

Mozart, Symphony No. 41,composed 1788

Robert Jourdain. Music, The Brain and Ecstasy: How MusicCaptures Our Imagination. William Morrow, 1997. Reviewed byChristopher Lehmann-Haupt. New York Times: April 7, 1997.

"On musicology, he explains how 'the harmony of virtually all the music we hear, whether Chopin or Elvis, is rooted in chants sung by medieval Christian monks,' which in time were separated into high and low parts identical to each other simply because not all singers could manage the same range. Jourdain makes clear how in the 17th century, to get rid of 'the inharmonicity problem' of the Pythagorean scale (where, for complex reasons notes sound out of tune after a change of key), composers 'simply returned their instruments so that all notes were equally spaced,' evening out the distances between the 12 notes of the scale so that each would rise in frequency by the same 5.9 percent as the note before.

When some musicians complained that they couldn't tune their instruments in the resulting scale, called 'equally tempered,' Johann Sebastian Bach disagreed and proved it by writing 'The Well-Tempered Clavier,' a collection of preludes and fugures for the tempered harpsichor, one for every major and minor key. 'Hardly anyone has looked back since. . . it made possible nearly all of what we regard as music today -- not just Chopin and Debussy, but also Duke Ellington and Eric Clapton.'. . .

One explanation of why music moves us, he concludes, is based on 'the discrepancy theory,' which regards emotion as 'a reaction to unexpected experience. . . . Music sets up anticipations and then satisfies them. It can withold its resolutions, and heighten anticipation by doing so, then to satisfy the anticipation in a great gush of resolution. . . . By providing the brain with an artificial environment, and forcing it through that environment in controlledways, music imparts the means of experiencing relations far deeper than we encounter in our everyday lives. . . . As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand and realize that we can be more than we normally are, and that the world is more than it seems. That is cause enough for ecstasy.'