Music as Medicine

The History of Music Therapy Since Antiquity

Peregrine Horden, Peregrine Horden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351557467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music, whether performed or heard, has been seen as therapeutic in the history of many cultures. How have its therapeutic properties been conceptualized and explained? Which cultures have used music therapy? What were their aims and techniques, and how much continuity is there between ancient, medieval and modern practice? These are the questions addressed by the essays in this volume. They focus on the place of music therapy in European intellectual, medical and musical traditions, from their classical roots to the development of the music therapy profession since the Second World War. Chapters covering the Judaic, Islamic, Indian and South-East Asian traditions add global, comparative perspectives. Music as Medicine is the first book to establish the whole shape of the history of music therapy in a systematic and scholarly way. It addresses the problem of defining what music therapy has meant in different cultures and periods, and sets the agenda for future research in the subject. It will appeal to a diverse readership of historians, musicologists, anthropologists, and practitioners.

CHAPTER ONE

Musical Solutions:¹ Past and Present in Music Therapy

Peregrine Horden

I

‘The present age is one of overproduction…never has there been so much music-making and so little musical experience of a vital order.’ Thus Constant Lambert, the composer. He was writing in 1934, in the classic Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline.² The chapter is entitled ‘The appalling popularity of music’. It goes on to complain that, thanks to the ‘gramophone’, the ‘wireless’ and the loudspeaker, ‘music of a sort is everywhere and at every time’. The result: total anaesthesia. If the BBC broadcast the Last Trump, Lambert expostulates, ‘it is doubtful if it would interfere with the cry of “No Trumps” from the card table’.

We have at present no idea of what havoc may be wrought in a few years’ time by the combined effect of the noise of city life and the noise of city music – an actual atrophy of the aural nerves would seem to be indicated…We live in an age of tonal debauch where the blunting of the finer edge of pleasure leads only to a more hysterical and frenetic attempt to recapture it. It is obvious that second-rate mechanical music is the most suitable fare for those to whom musical experience is no more than a mere aural tickling, just as the prostitute provides the most suitable outlet for those to whom sexual experience is no more than the periodic removal of a recurring itch. The loud speaker is the street walker of music.³

Were he writing today, Lambert’s metaphors would doubtless be even more florid. Music is omnipresent, and – worse – mechanized to an extent that he could scarcely have envisaged. Only within certain fundamentalist Muslim states is there any escaping its dictatorship over the acoustic environment, its unvarying and literally inhuman rhythm. The agents of infiltration now include the ‘mini-system’ and the Walkman. Much of their output is, however, ignored, left as background. The responses evoked by that which really is listened to, however ‘profound’ they may be, are fleeting. In a relatively tiny market for recorded classical music, ‘crossovers’, tenor megastars, or concert warhorses predominate, while for the minority there is huge variety that encourages a detached promiscuity among collectors, a pseudo-culture of far vaster proportions than Malraux’s ‘museum without walls’.⁴ To quote George Steiner, a more measured, but no less disheartened, critic of aural culture than Lambert:

If we choose, we can put on Opus 131 while eating the breakfast cereal. We can play the St. Matthew Passion any hour of the day or week…the effects are ambiguous: there can be an unprecedented intimacy, but also a devaluation…A Muzak of the sublime envelops us.⁵

And with the mechanical beat and harmonic banality of most popular music, profundity, even of the fleeting kind furnished by the latest technology, is seldom in question. Not only can music be so readily meaningless, an addiction to decibels and metrical bass; it can be positively damaging, to the ear when brought too close to loudspeakers, to society when the sound falls directly on the inner ear from the headphone, perhaps to the whole intellect.⁶

Some recent experiments can be adduced which seem to illustrate that potential for damage, at a very basic, cellular level. But they also point towards an alternative, and less bleak way of summing up our aural culture. Despite all the evidence that a greater quantity of music is more utterly ephemeral and trivialized in our time than ever before, attention can, increasingly, also be called to havens of serious and profound response that relieve the global landscape of rock and its offspring.

It is not just a question of a minority for whom listening to classical music is life itself. Picture the following. Six human cell cultures are aligned in vitro. Five are of tumour cells – malignant glioma, breast adenocarcinoma, colon adenocarcinoma, skin malignant melanoma and lung carcinoma; the remaining one is of normal dermal fibroblasts. The cultures are placed in separate humidified incubators. One incubator contains a water-resistant hi-fi speaker connected to a portable stereo system. The control incubator has no such musical attachment. Each culture is tested in triplicate for an average of four experiments. Music plays from cassette tapes from 5.00 p.m. to 9.00 a.m. continuously for ten days at a constant volume. One type of music consists of ‘primordial sounds’ – Sama Veda from the ‘Maharishi Ayur–Veda system of natural health care’; the other is ‘Back in Black’ by the rock band AC/DC. Compared with no music at all, primordial sound significantly decreases the average growth across cell lines. In the presence of hard rock, however, growth of cells, though inconsistent, tends significantly to increase. ‘We conclude,’ write the authors of the research paper just summarized, ‘that sound has an effect on the growth of neoplastic and normal human cells in vitro’.⁷ But the possible newspaper headlines can be imagined: hard rock gives you cancer; Ayurvedic sound cures cancer. How can this happen?

Cells and intracellular structures apparently vibrate dynamically. These vibrations may play a role in the cell’s self-regulation, affecting its shape, motility, and signal transduction. They can be changed by both growth factors and carcinogenesis. Incoming vibrations, such as sound waves, are perhaps transferred from the peripheral membrane to the nucleus and DNA. Sama Veda has a preponderance of low frequency tones and a regular slow rhythm, which may, by some means yet to be determined, restore the DNA to its own normal low-frequency vibrations. ‘Back in Black’, on the other hand, includes more high-frequency tones than the ‘primordial sound’ and its tempo and rhythm are alike irregular. It literally sets up the wrong vibrations.

The experiments and hypotheses I have been reporting are those of three members of the Department of Pathology, College of Medicine, Ohio State University. Their work was supported by the Lancaster Foundation, Bethesda, Maryland, and also by the Maharishi Ayur–Veda Foundation of America. There are three reasons for selecting their paper as an opening example in this collaborative historical enquiry into music’s healing potential.⁸

First, it can stand as an extreme instance of how seriously the powers of music are nowadays being taken – a ne plus ultra of musical therapy to set against the provocatively glum panorama with which I prefaced it. For cancer, along with AIDS, is the most terrifying modem disease. And in this example we are being told that music – without benefit of psychosomatic mechanism, cultural expectation, placebo effect and so on – is apparently capable of retarding the growth of cancer cells, at least in vitro.

Second, the paper represents the ambiguous status of musical therapeutics today. The research project could hardly be described as mainstream. It comes from the world of complementary medicine. It appears in the relatively new journal Alternative Therapies in Clinical Practice. And its purpose, one senses, is more to endorse than to test the ‘system of natural health care known as Maharishi Ayur–Veda, which…utilizes “primordial” sounds as one of its techniques for restoring health’.⁹ On the other hand, the authors can reasonably assert that they are not alone in their finding that sound or music can have a significant and positive impact on living organisms:¹⁰

A study conducted in India showed that experimental plants exposed to sound waves in the form of Nadeshwaram music showed more vigorous growth…In the US, Hicks demonstrated that corn receiving broadcast of a continuous low note had an increased yield…Retallack conducted a study in which plants showed a positive reaction when exposed to Ravi Shankar or Bach, growing toward the speaker, while a second group of plants exhibited a negative reaction to acid rock, growing away from the speaker and showing a random growth pattern.¹¹

As such research comes to seem less marginal, the finding that plants or cell cultures have better musical taste than people will presumably lose its shock value. Meanwhile, its proponents can point to others involved in music therapy whose standing is less ambiguous than their own: professional music therapists and those researching music’s psycho-physiological effects (see further below, and Tyler, Chapter 16).

A third reason for using this paper is that it opens up a historical perspective. Besides a sweeping appeal to congenial research by others, it looks to the past for legitimation. It looks to the non-European past above all, to Ayurvedic healing in ancient India; but also to the medical antiquity of the Persians and Hebrews; and additionally to the classical tradition in Europe, a tradition which runs from the Greeks to the Renaissance and on into the nineteenth century (and is the main subject of this volume).¹² Present-day enquiry is presented as continuous with the efforts of these much earlier cultures. The relationship of music to medicine is portrayed as almost always having been close. An analogy is implicitly drawn with traditional ways in which the regularity of music (harmonic or rhythmic) has been thought to alleviate irregularity or imbalance (dissonance) in the mind or body. To such traditions there has been only one interruption: ‘the technological explosion of allopathic medicine in the 20th century’.¹³

To sum up so far: the findings of the research paper which I have been relaying are of ambiguous stature as normal science; they occupy an extreme position on the spectrum of musical possibilities, at the opposite end from the trivializing of so much contemporary music. None the less, they open up a surprising range of therapeutic territories. These territories can be labelled – not altogether objectively – the ‘heterodox’, the ‘professional’, and the ‘historical’. The professional is mainstream music therapy in Europe and America; the heterodox represents a variety of non-mainstream currents; history is the domain to which they both variously appeal for precedent or legitimacy. I shall spend the rest of this chapter looking at each in turn, to sketch what continuities and discontinuities have been discerned within and between them – and with how much justification. I shall thus, as intimated in the preceding Introduction, be moving from the present back into the past, in order to open the ground for subsequent chapters, which follow a reverse course, from antiquity back to the present.

II

The heterodox shows itself in a variety of forms and has been given a variety of more...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Musical Solutions: Past and Present in Music Therapy
• Part I: Ancient Literate Traditions
• Part II: Medieval Europe
• Part III: Renaissance and Early Modern Europe
• Part IV: Tarantism
• Part V: Modern Currents
• Index