A good yarn by the late Oliver Sachs, thanks to the brainpickings website.
Musicked Down the Mountain: How Oliver Sacks Saved His Own Life by Literature and Song: The extraordinary survival story of “a creature of muscle, motion and music, all inseparable and in unison with each other."
"In his 1984 memoir A Leg to Stand On, Dr. Sacks tells the story of an extraordinary experience he had atop a Norwegian mountain a decade earlier, on 'an afternoon of peculiar splendor, earth and air conspiring in beauty, radiant, tranquil, suffused in serenity' many miles from the nearest human being — an experience in which the only thing that stood between him and his death was music; an experience that brought him not merely near death but in an intimate tango with it danced to the sound of life itself."