Listening to and Playing Bach’s Music Is Thermodynamically Irrelevant during Hot Weather

Well-tempered (Wohltemperierte) vibrations transmit energy, but they cannot change anything. They will neither cool nor warm us by even half a degree. Sounding at their loudest, they will not stop glaciers melting, floods or summer hailstorms. They will bring relief and rescue to no endangered species except Homo sapiens—and even then only to those living in the West. An explanation of this experience remains beyond our reach. For listening to Bach can indisputably both cool and warm us, and bring relief. Some write that it can even save. Rationality fares poorly in explaining our personal experiences. Words such as harmony, beauty and metaphysics do not name anything that can be treated as the cause of a change we actually feel. Unus mundus—a world without cracks, integrated, interconnected and transparent—remains a utopia. We experience life in many separate worlds. And it is not Reason but individual experience, sometimes entirely incomprehensible, that remains the only bridge between them. A bridge is not a symbolic construction. It is an unsteady structure, but one that supports real movement of the kind we can describe in physical terms. Whoever can perceive such passages becomes a pontifex maximus, leading farther than is possible.