Music For Healing

How do you talk about the physical and metaphysical powers of music without coming off sounding hackneyed? Is such a thing possible in our corporeal world? And yet we are – have been our entire lives, really – surrounded by stories of music’s mystical qualities.

Some have taken the form of religious fables (the Old Testament tale of the force of seven ram’s horns that Joshua and the Israelites used to fell the walls of Jericho, for instance); others can be readily found in decimated cultural histories (such as the healing songs that Native American medicine men received in dreams); while the contemporary ones take the form of anecdotes about holistic transformative events, awakenings embraced by listeners of spiritual jazz or new age music, or the individual trips taken by inebriated revelers who mix sound and substance, whether that formula is bebop and pin joints, the Grateful Dead and LSD, or acid house on a couple of E’s. Though back in the 9-to-5, nobody takes these stories seriously, with a world full of literalists playing them for punch lines.

But then maybe you experience an event that involves music and transcendental changes of physical states so beyond the norm of what can be explained by commonly accepted beliefs that your world outlook evolves and you try reporting it in simple terms to non-religious people who demand the burden of scientific proof.

In May of 2001, the Icelandic band Sigur Ros was on its inaugural tour of the US following the long-awaited domestic release of its album Ágætis byrjun when they arrived at New York’s Irving Plaza for a sold out show. The music, especially in its live presentation, was unlike anything most American rock club audiences had previously experienced – expansive symphonic rock made out of deep, piercing, layers of consonant tones that focused on upper-register frequencies, played loudly for extended periods. (With the bonus of Jonsi’s high-pitched delivery of lyrics that were intelligible only in their emotional resonance, since they were sung in a language of his own invention).

The sound and energy Sigur Ros’ performances were achieving was ethereal and other-worldly, yet what pushed the scene into a supremely rarefied space was the crowd’s reaction, one I’ve never seen before or since: by the second or third song, people began fainting. At first it seemed a put-on, the drink or drugs taking hold of a couple of individuals – though that seemed at odds with the rest of the concert and audience’s sanctified air. But then it continued happening and became akin to a minor epidemic, with nearly a dozen people losing consciousness by the concert’s end. Standing on the balcony, you could see them dropping like flies.

Interviewed in the hallway after, most said this was their first time blacking out. They were not inebriated, overheated or in any way unwell – but now, they felt elated. They could not explain what had happened to them except that all cited being adrift in the crucible of Sigur Ros’ music, before losing touch with awareness – and then with gravity.

When later I incredulously brought up questions of how grown adults could be felled by sound, people smarter than I would say, “It’s all about the tones, frequencies and the sensitivity of an individual’s nervous system.” This opened up a line of questions and investigations that’s never ceased, because if music has the power to physically alter cognitive being so radically, how else can it transform the people who are deeply engaged with it?

Might there be proof hidden in the stories of the sublime long espoused by both Saturday night ravers and the Sunday morning parishioners after separate sessions with their rhythmic spirit of choice? And if we agree that the notions of “House is a Feeling” and “God is in the House” could strikingly and similarly affect the communal masses, is it not then equally possible that another set of tonalities – ones that resonate at different tempos and with their own vibrations – might produce other physical results? Could music be the actual healer that its creators have been claiming it is for millennia?

A few years ago, when he spoke at the Red Bull Music Academy in New York, music philosopher and ambient composer Brian Eno, offered up an idea directly adjacent to that. He was discussing one of his then-new projects that he built at Montefiore Hospital, in Hove, England, a chapel-like quiet room that played his “77 Million Paintings” installation, which combined ambient music and glacially changing colored light patterns.

The room was designed as a resting place for “people who were undergoing treatment – chemotherapy in particular – whose nerves were a bit jangly and needed to reassemble themselves, who needed to quiet themselves down; it proved to be very successful, not only with the patients but with the staff,” and hospital administrators began discovering that spending time in the room helped lower blood pressure, bringing about a greater sense of serenity.

Eno, who is no stranger to the practice of music therapy (he was instrumental in producing a 1995 charity album for War Child, the European organization that raises money for the arts-based treatment of children in war-torn areas), likened the hospital installation’s effect on viewers and listeners to “surrender,” which in this case he defined as “an active choice not to take control, but to be part of the flow.” Later in the lecture, when Eno returned to his idea of “surrender,” he added that his version meant “being in a receptive and trusting and vulnerable condition, open to possibilities.” As though for music’s physical power to work, one has to either be all-believing or desperate, which is maybe where the rest of the contemporary world lags behind.

A similar skepticism follows all manner of musical therapies, since their foundations rest in psychology, spirituality and the power of invisible sound waves, rather than in the Western medical tomes, recommended doses and proven chemical cures. Which is not to say that its practice only involves those open-minded about all sorts of sacred experiences.

Author and new age composer Michael Tyrrell’s Wholetones project, a book and a set of CDs (or YouTubes) featuring long-form musical pieces based on different healing frequencies, Tyrrell details how those frequencies affect specific ailments, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s a relative bestseller on Amazon US (in the Top 1000 more than two years after its release), and if you dive a little bit deeper into Wholetones scripture and you’ll see that its language is tailored to the Evangelical Christian community, even though the tonalities at its center just as easily harken to the building block drones of everything from arch-minimalist La Monte Young’s Dream House to the singing bowls and chants of Tibetan monks.

Numerous such programs can be found throughout the States and across the world, like sonic versions of spa treatments and natural baths. Simple cultural capitalist mathematics would state that there are hucksters aplenty here, but it is interesting to see that some of the musical snake-oils they're selling feature exactly the same ingredients that educated spiritual music consumers trust in other packages.

One of the most trustworthy figures on the subject of how music affects health was the late neurologist and medical storyteller Oliver Sacks. As a best-selling author whose case histories turned into Oscar-nominated films, Sacks was accepted by the general public as a beloved kooky scientist, telling first-hand yarns from his decades-long study of the brain.

But under the hood, Sacks was also a seeker – he spent much of the ’60s experimenting with copious amounts of pharmaceuticals and psychedelics – whose belief system was shaped by not only the scientific method he studied, but by a clear acceptance of individualism and the unexplainable he experienced. In other words, Sacks was open in ways many of his colleagues could not afford to be.

His 2008 book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain is, like most of his books, a compendium of subject stories from years of neurological practice that makes no definitive conclusions. Yet in Sacks’ tales of how music works with patients’ health, it is not only a therapeutic tool but also forms a kind of background belief system, no miracle cure but a path towards clearer existential communication and holistic being. His recollections flow towards the light.

Music appears in the form of music therapy, a magnet for drawing Parkinson’s patients out of their shells (sparking graceful dance-like motions from those who have trouble walking, and singing by those who have trouble communicating), or helping post-stroke recoveries of speech patterns through harmony and rhythm. For Tourette’s patients, music works as a trigger, a sedative and, most impressively, a muse. Jazz drummer David Aldridge talks about “harness[ing] the enormous energy of [the] syndrome,” that “deeply intertwined” with the “creative, unpredictable musical improvisations” he would play.

Or classical pianist Nick Van Bloss, who would go from days that featured as many as 40,000 Tourette’s-derived tics every 24 hours, to the serenity required in performing Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Sacks quotes Van Bloss’ memoir of a childhood revised by a piano: “When I played, my tics almost seemed to disappear. It was like a miracle.”

Of course being both a seeker and a trusted medical professional, Sacks refused to either prove the miracle or attempt to invalidate it. But his wisdom of experience included continually placing himself in situations – next to the stories, if you will – where a miracle that involved music’s power just might possibly occur. In May of 2008, as part of the World Science Festival in New York, Sacks organized a program on the subject of “Music and the Brain” at Harlem’s First Abyssinian Baptist Church, home of one of the finest gospel choirs in the city, which, on that evening, brought the house down.

The event worked as promotion for Musicophilia, the good doctor’s stories on the evening coming directly from the book’s pages. Yet it also made a philosophical connection, between art, science and faith, a connection lost in a world built on fundamentalism and data, a connection central to the idea of music as a healing endeavor. Before the event, First Abyssinian pastor Reverend Calvin O. Butts III, made those connections explicit when talking to a BBC reporter covering the event: “What we have been studying is that when you pray, there’s actually a physiological change in the body. Music is very much a part of this. There are certain notes that generate in the human body a kind of peacefulness.”

They are the same notes our bodies search for from the cradle to the grave. They are also the notes that permeate the memoirs of Jennifer Hollis, a music thanatologist and the author of Music for the End of Life: Easing the Pain and Preparing the Passage. Hollis plays the harp for dying patients, and as our worldview evolves, the notion of what healing has come to encompass progresses as well.

“I once played for a woman as her daughter kept watch by her side,” Hollis writes, in a piece from her book excerpted in The New York Times last year. “I closely observed the woman’s breath and face, searching for signs that she was comfortable or indications that I should adjust the music. Her breaths settled into a slow, steady pace, and she appeared peaceful. I thought that the music vigil was complete, and it seemed as if it was the right time for me to slip out of the room. As I turned away from the harp toward the daughter, she kept her gaze on her mother and didn’t look up. I realized that the daughter was tuned in to a shift in her mother that I had missed. I began to play again, and the patient’s breathing slowed. Several minutes later, it stopped.”