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In a powerful TV news report this week, we saw the violinist Maria Baronovska playing alone, in the empty, bomb-damaged Philharmonic Hall in Kharkiv. The sound of shells exploding nearby, added gut-wrenching bass notes to her moving performance. Elsewhere, the violinist Vera Lytovchenko was playing amidst the dust of a bomb shelter for her fellow Kharkiv residents. It went viral on social media. And the cellist Denys Karachevtsev has been playing Bach, in the open air ruins of the city. He chose Bach, he said, because the music is “spiritual.” “It raises people’s spirits,” he said. “It makes people like me, not give up.” You don’t have to experience it in the context of war, of course, to be moved by sublime and often sorrowful minor-key music, as many of these pieces have been. The writer Susan Cain, who’s researched this, says on average we play a happy song 175 times from our playlist, but a melancholic one, over 800. She believes we’re drawn to ‘bittersweet’ music not just because it holds our emotional weight, but because it reaches us, as if from another world, one that so many of us can feel we’re in exile from. The Bible says that ‘God has set eternity in our hearts’ - which hints for me at the divine ache we can feel through separation from each other, and from God, and from the better world that feels so frustratingly just out of reach. ‘How long,’ as the psalmist sang. But that better world remains a possibility through its very expression, in the defiant, divine beauty of a music that carries us beyond words, and, hopefully, beyond division, too. A friend told me recently how she’s listening to Rachmaninov’s Vespers, to identify with the spiritual sorrow of Russia. During the siege of Sarajevo, the journalist Alan Little witnessed the cellist Vedran Smailovic playing Albinoni’s Adagio, in the rubble of a blown up bakery. He concluded that the need for the soul to find artistic expression is as visceral as the need to find food and water. He watched later that year as people emerged from hiding in a nearby forest, having fled their homes. Among them, an 80-year-old man, looking for his wife. "Do you mind if I ask, are you a Muslim or a Croat?" the journalist enquired. The answer, he says, shames him to this day: "I am," said the man, "a musician."