You are the music

The longer I live, the more I realize how indispensable music is in my life. I can't imagine a day without at least thirty minutes of something classical or popular, whether on Youtube or the radio or the CD player in the car or the usually enjoyable TV station, Classic Arts Showcase (produced free of charge and free of commercials!).

Music can take me out of myself, help me become centered in the present, detached from the usual anxieties and realities. This week it was a bit of Dixieland jazz, songs of Lerner and Lowe, Puccini in the brilliant tenor voice of Jonas Kaufmann, Gilbert and Sullivan with their comic rhymes, Chopin's nocturnes, and so much more.

The effect of music on the brain was rarely so well expressed as by a noted scientist and gifted writer who just died: Oliver Sacks.

This week, in reading about Sacks I found (thanks to Maria Popova's "Brain Pickings") excerpts from his 1984 memoir, A Leg to Stand On. There Sacks describes in often lyrical detail how he was terrified on a mountain in Norway in 1974, threatened by a bull and an injured leg, feeling totally alone and abandoned, facing death.

What came to his aid?  Rhythm, melody, music: he began to chant over and over as he hobbled along in the middle of nowhere until "the musical beat was generated within me, and all my muscles responded deliberately." 

After chanting the song for some time, he began to feel, deep within, that he had no room for fear because he was filled with music, including the "silent music of the body."  Sacks quotes T. S. Eliot: "you are the music, while the music lasts." And he becomes a creature of motion, muscle and music, all inseparable and in union with one another.

The result: a feeling of gratitude, what I would call a prayerful experience.  As in his later book, Musicophilia, Sacks reflects on how amazing it was that a remembered melody should have such a profound effect on him, that music would be so passionately alive for him, conveying to him "a sweet feeling of life. .  .As if the animating and creative principle of the whole world was revealed, that life itself was music, or consubstantial with music, that our living moving flesh, itself, was 'solid' music. . .  ."

Facing his own death in recent years, Sacks kept writing up to the very end, brim full of life.  Now I am inspired to want to read more by this brilliant writer who found what many others have felt but seldom expressed: the power of music at the cellular level, something that is part of our being and that connects us to the cosmos.

Music is Useless??

I found on the Internet a statement by the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker that astounded me: music "as far as biological cause and effect are concerned is useless."  I don't know the context of his argument, but I suspect many experts will sharply disagree.

Everything in my experience and reading shows that, as Shakespeare said, "music hath charms to soothe the savage breast" (or beast; we' not sure).

Just yesterday, feeling wound up, I listened to K.D. Lang and Tony Bennett in a wonderful duet of the old pop song, "Because of You."  It is done with the slowness of a classical adagio (think Barber, Mahler, Beethoven...) or the piano nocturnes of Chopin or Satie.  The effect was, of course, calming.
I have no doubt that a loud march or bit of heavy metal would have the opposite effect if I wanted to increase my productivity.

I did a quick check on Google to see if I was going crazy or if Pinker could be right. An article in the Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing concludes that music therapy reduces pain and anxiety in patients recovering from heart surgery.  A non-scholarly article listed a whole list of physiological benefits of music, from decreasing blood pressure, improving sleep, reducing headaches, helping memory and brain functions, boosting immunity, etc.

The psychological effects of music, like those of meditation and prayer, have been shown to increase inner peace, reduce stress, anxiety and depression, among others. What type of music is involved in such studies?

Not only Mozart but many other forms of music, including chant.  It seems to me the slower and softer the better because relaxation as well as meditation involves reducing the fast pace of daily life. The Slow Movement that began with food in Italy now includes many other aspect of practical wisdom, based on the fact that the fundamental human restlessness and the speed of our lives causes stress that harms body and mind.

As I write this, I have a quiet string quartet by Mozart playing. A day without music would be a day without light or air; all are essential for life in our anxious age. I cannot argue on a scientific basis with Pinker's quoted statement, but I know that my experience with music "soothing the savage breast" is universal.