[dredmorbius]

As for "listening to Mozart," that strikes me as an extremely passive activity.

My lay theorizing on this: certain types of music (and much of the classical repetoire) helps relax the mind. We spend far too much of our time being grossly overstimulated, and I've found that a great many of the typical stimulations in a Western experience (advertising, technology, popular music, city streets, etc.) simply wear at me. Nature, nonlinear landscapes, classical (or earlier) Western music (there is some awfully annoying non-western music, Indonesian gamelan being very high on the annoyance list for me) help immensely in this regard.

Just as strength training is stimulus for growth that comes during recovery, I suspect music may be part of the downtime which helps the brain and/or emotional / stress aspects of the body recover. Meditation or similar practices might operate similarly.

Total armchair theory here, but it's what I've got.

[jonnathanson]

As armchair theory goes, it's not a bad one. Taking it one step further, I could see how classical music might activate / operate on some of the same brain patterns as certain sleep cycles. Sleep is well known to be our brain's equivalent of garbage collection and recovery.