La musica mueve el corazon

Why does certain music always pull at my "heart strings"? Music, more than a lot of other sensory modes, triggers unpredicated memories for me. Right now I'm listening to the soundtrack from El Laberinto del Fauno, which has me constantly on the verge of tears. It's almost as if I can only listen to it when I'm feeling particularly sentimental and just want to give in and have a good cry. Part of the reason this is happening is the associations I have with the experiences of that movie--first in Spain, where I just saw it randomly with Roberto and had no expectations and was blown away; in that instance, of course, I was thinking in Spanish, living, breathing in Spanish. It just had a different feeling. Then there's the actual power of the story, of the images, acting, music, all that. It's so beautiful. So, then I saw it again a couple of weeks ago with Enoch, Mom, and John...of course, there were subtitles. There were members of my family. There were giant buckets of popcorn everywhere and people blathering in English all around me. So the set-up was different, but as soon as I settled into the movie I was back in Spain, thinking in Spanish, loving those characters, all of it. And something about the music...Guillermo del Toro just knew where to put the right type of music to make me shudder with sobs. It sounds terrible, perhaps, but anyway. It just felt so inexplicably good to cry like that, to not be able to control my breathing and feel that swell in my throat and just have all the feeling squeezed out of me until I'm exhausted. I miss Spain. I miss playing music, too. And I kind of wish that this country had a rich, terrible, overwhelming history the way Spain does, with its hidden twists and periods of unrecorded mystery.