Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners; she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Music does something to people that argument does not. Playing it, or listening properly rather than as background, asks for a kind of ordered attention, and the effect carries past the last note. A room that has just listened to something together is calmer than it was.

Give it a proper place this week rather than a background one. Half an hour, sitting still, one record or one piece all the way through, with nothing else running. If you played once and stopped, consider going back to it; the discipline is the point as much as the sound.