Can Music Save Your Life Mark Edmundson Summary

In the article, “Can Music Save Your Life?,” Mark Edmundson discusses the different impact music can have on one’s life. He starts off the article with the use of rhetorical questions about how music affects one and a personal example of a song that impacted his life. Edmundson then describes how his music choices affected his attitude and moodiness with specific examples about how certain negative song choices could explain and/or justify his negative emotions or vice-versa. Later, he mentions how music can help one better understand life and it’s meaning if one would deeply listen to the music. He uses well-known philosophers and their views on music to portray how music can have both a positive and negative effect. Afterward, he transitions to some of the current impacts of music on the young adults in the 21st century.

Edmundson also hypothesizes some of the psychological reasons that students listen to music.

He professes how, even in the current generation, music can have an impact on teens like it impacted him based on a few factors. The author gives his personal testimony about how music became a segway into writing and expressing himself. Because of this testimony, he demands that music is one’s true way to express oneself about beliefs, feelings, and moods, and he insists that it is necessary for people to not solely rely on others to express their own feelings; instead, he challenges the reader to make their own input into the world of emotions and expression. Edmundson claims that if one will let music impact them it will change how they feel and act. He concludes his article with bold statements reinforcing that someone else cannot express one’s own beliefs, but one must express their own self. While Edmundson does make some accurate statements about how music can impact one’s life, there is one minor statement that I do not agree

with.
One point of Edmundson’s that I do not agree with is the fact that student’s need music to escape from their lives. The title “Can Music Save One’s Life?” implies the disparity of a life or death situation which inaccurately portrays that the article is actually about how music can influence someone’s life. A point in the article reverts back to the title as if one or two songs can totally alter someone’s life. While I do not completely disagree that music can actually save someone’s life, the scenario described in the article is not widely applicable because a large number of students are not to the point of living or dying. A better title to match the discussion could have been ‘Can Music Alter One’s Life?,’ because it is much more plausible scenario than the previous.