In just a few minutes music can change your day, ... thus your life.

Integrate music within your experiences of living. Here's an example.

Excerpt: In 1890, when Johannes Brahms turned 57, he told a friend that his career as a composer was probably over, that he’d done enough. The next year, he wrote his will.

But before he died, in 1897, he had a final burst of creativity, including writing four sets of short pieces for solo piano.

They contain introverted, quiet, thoughtful music. Brahms called a lot of these little pieces intermezzos — suggesting that he was just having a brief word with the listener between grander statements.

This one, though, he called a romance: a tender, intimate song without words. Listen to the whole thing.

Then listen to this moment, to the lines in the pianist’s two hands — the melody, higher up, in the right hand, and that calm, regular flow of notes in the left:

Listen to the second section, which Brahms put in a different key for a different mood — swifter, airier, perhaps a memory of a freer time:

Listen to the way that the pianist trills — making a sound that’s like quivering — to get from that second section back to the music from the beginning:

Do you hear the return of that original music in a new way after the contrasting middle section?

With Brahms, at the end of the 19th century, there is often a sense of lateness, or maybe a better word is afterness. His music gives the feeling that he thought he was living and working long beyond the time of true greatness, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.