The Secret to having Heav'nly Music to Wake up to

is getting up early on Sunday morning and tuning in the f.m. radio broadcasts from across the continental U.S.A.  So far--while lawful and delicious stimulants have gently percolated through me, and the sun has risen with much pomp and color--I've heard: a Bach cantata (#42), Rameau's suite from Platee, a Corelli sonata, a Vivaldi concerto for two oboes; and, just now, I'm being charmed by a sort of symphonic suite ("sinfonia spirituosa") by Telemann.   Am I a better person for it? Or does such music just make me feel better?  Confucius whom I embarrassingly resemble, and Plato, would have opted for the former.  Less historical personages would say that, because it makes me feel better, Heav'nly Music makes it less likely that I will be bad (People are always forgetting the Lessons of Auschwitz). 

And now an old favorite of mine, and of Kristen's and mine, Mozart's 'Prague' symphony, K. 504 (Isn't K. 503 a piano concerto?  the 'Great' C Major?  Indeed.  I just googled it.  According to Wikipedia, K's 503 and 504 were written "side by side."  Fascinating.  Except for being works of sublime genius and absolute mastery, they are nothing alike.  Only Shakespeare and Beethoven, that I can think of, have "side by side"s of similarly suggestive power.)  Perfect Music--which raises some really interesting esthetic questions which cross over into being ethical questions:   (1) Is anything else, in the same sense, Music?  (2) If it isn't, why listen to it?  [We'll get back to Mozart in a minute.  Just now to note, that the sly music programmers have put on Bach's double D Minor violin concerto--as if to answer the question of what, besides Mozart, is Music?]  Applying the inherently anachronistic irrelevance of Postmodernist Feminist "discourse" to the vitreous, nonsexual "text" of the 'Prague' symphony, I think we must ask ourselves (as, I'm sure, Luce Irigaray would ask herself), "Is it fair?"  There is, as was often noted in his day, a chilling, mocking "demonic clangour" in Mozart's music, "privileged" in its very essence, which makes no accommodation for the innately human needs of dancing-to, singing-along-with, and talking-over.  Such music seems designed to inhibit, frustrate, and ultimately to devalue us by making us aware of our inconsequence.