My friend Amy Scurria goat some good press in which it was mentioned that she objected to music being treated as background, like Kenny G.

Amy, I've been thinking I want to share something since I read the article on you (congrats for the good press, by the way).  It's my Kenny G moment.

Now I'm not someone who listens to music as "background," unless I'm SO familiar with it that it moves me on some automatic sub-conscious level.  I CAN multi-task with music as a soundtrack, but it becomes my main emotional animator while I'm doing something else.  If there is music on (for example) while driving and conversing, I often give the music the lead voice in my brain.

I'd never heard of Kenny G (I don't listen to much of that genre) but one day I was in a travel-induced stress and boarded a United Airlines flight and this sound washed over me and completely changed the moment.  'What is THAT?!' I said to myself.  I liked it.

The truth is there is a wide range of good music that could have affected me at that moment.  The anxiety of travel is constrictive, pulling my body tight as I worry about missed connections and things that can go wrong.  Music takes me on emotional flights - good music, anyway.  It also has intrusive power, in the best sense - it will butt into whatever grumph of a snitch I've worked myself into, transforming it, making me happy.

In that moment, the soaring saxophone of Kenny G was exactly right to lift me into bliss.

There are a few other moments I can think of where music has intruded and completely switched the color of my entire day.

I remember rushing down to the long escalator into the Porter Square T stop (Boston's subway).  As I rode all the way down the escalator I rode into the resonance of a fiddler and flute player (not the right kind of music to call her a flautist) and it changed my whole day.

Once there was a campfire sing when I was 9 that woke me up to the fun of singing (before that, alas, music class in school had made music unattractive).  There was singing Bach's B minor mass when the first Gulf war was just beginning - it taught me about Easter the way no sermon ever could.  There was some beautiful music at an open mic that convinced me to go to the college I was visiting.  Crowfoot, a band from Maine, that just blasted up the roof at the last contra dance in Walpole!!  The accordion player on the train.  And so many other moments.

And of course there are unexpected musical moments that make me cringe as well.

It's interesting that the times I'm most affected by music haven't been at pre-arranged concerts, but times when I really needed to be stopped in my tracks.  The power of a street musician is greater than one playing a concert hall.  The power of a certain song coming on the radio is greater than playing it on my CD.

That's not to say I don't love concerts and my music collection.  In fact, to me, this music is spiritual food.  The power of live music is real.  But the power of being stopped in my tracks is special.

I went to a music store later and described what I heard and the clerk identified it as Kenny G, gave me a funny look, and sold me a tape.  I've listened to it a bit since, and enjoyed it, but it never transported me in the same way.  You can't hold onto that kind of moment.