Music has always had an influence on people, events, and holidays. Specifically, during the holidays, music can boost your mood and more importantly, bring back memories from the past, specifically one’s childhood.
Many different artists like Mariah Carey, Louis Armstrong, Micheal Bublé, Wham!, and Bobby Helms have had an impact on many people around the world growing up during the holidays, especially Christmas.
Certain music can bring back memories of you never knew you would remember. According to a study at Harvard Medical School done by Dan Cohen, music can affect a person’s behavior, mood, and quality of life.
But during the holidays, Christmas music can inflict memories from your childhood. According to band teacher Micheal Yaros music can elicit a psychological response from the brain when it is heard.
“Music is very personal to everyone, and it also elicits a physiological response from the brain.,” Yaros said. “When music is heard, the brain also records what is happening during the listening session, which is why people associate music with certain powerful memories.”
With this being said, music has many different associations and connections throughout history. It can even be connected through emotion or a specific group of people. According to Andre Frank ’26 groups of people like prisoners sing songs to make their situation better and get them moving.
“Music has always been the thing to connect everybody,” Frank said. “Whether it’s through oppression or happiness or sadness. Because, you know, if you think about in the past, with people like, prisoners, for example, they sing chants and songs together to get themselves moving on.”
Frank added how important history comes across in music as well. For example, he said how an entire genre, like jazz, was created through oppression, and like Black people wanted to come together as a group so they can have something for themselves.
While being on the topic of bringing people together, Stevenson Alumni and current student at Central Michigan University for music education, Seth Pelkey says that at CMU they have an event that brings together the instrumentalists and choirs to make music.
“During the holidays I’m usually working on a wide range of things from orchestral repertoire, personal repertoire, and additional content.,” Pelkey said. “At CMU we have an event called Juletide where we get instrumentalists and choirs together to make music together. There are a couple hundred people playing together at once and it is really impactful.”
Music is very personal to some, maybe even most people. It can bring back memories that were once forgotten. Micheal Yaros adds that people find a way to connect with music which makes it special.
“Since music so very personal, and so very powerful, try not to make fun of someone else’s listening tastes.,” Yaros said. “Instead, try to understand why that music is so important to them. Everyone has a guilty pleasure when it comes to music. “