Music of the Soul

Composing Life Out of Loss

Joy S. Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136915147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music of the Soul guides the reader through principles, techniques, and exercises for incorporating music into grief counseling, with the end goal of further empowering the grieving person.

Music has a unique ability to elicit a whole range of powerful emotional responses in people - even so far as altering or enhancing one's mood - as well as physical reactions. This interdisciplinary text draws in equal parts from contemporary grief/loss theory, music therapy research, historical examples of powerful music, case studies, and both self-reflecting and teaching exercises. Music is as much about beginnings as endings, and thus the book moves through life's losses into its new beginnings, using musical expression to help the bereaved find meaning in loss and hurt, and move forward with their lives. With numerous exercises and examples for implementing the use of music in grief counseling, the book offers a practical and flexible approach to a broad spectrum of mental health practitioners, from thanatologists to hospice staff, at all levels of professional training and settings.

1

CHAPTER

Music of the Soul — Composing Life Out of Loss

Music of the Soul

What music moves you?

Gets into or comes out of your being?

Music of the Soul

What music expresses your unique essence?

Voices your core self?

Music of the Soul

What is it?

• It’s About Life
• Music of the Soul: Terminology and Metaphors
• Readers’ Personal Applications
• Composing Life in the Midst of Loss

Music of the soul is any music that moves you to your core, innermost part of yourself. Music’s animating sound waves join in playful patterns of rhythms, melodies, harmonies, and forms. All civilizations, cultures, and religions give homage to the soul through their unique music. For readers of this book your music may be classical, jazz, gospel, rap, country, new age, ancient chanting, drumming, or something altogether new. Whatever its style, it taps into your core being. Your music of your soul calls forth a new response in the “hear” and now. Imagine:

You’re driving your car, with the radio providing a background pulse as you wind your way through traffic. Opening bars strike a familiar sound, and you’re suddenly back in time — and you’re in the present — both at the same time. Your heart and mind are thrown into an Oz-like world of chaotic yet connected images, emotions, and “aha” moment meanings of where and who you were back then, and where and who you are now.

Your music weaves together stories of your earliest childhood and most significant life moments. Simultaneously, it can evoke both celebration and sorrow; old meanings interwoven with new; fear and hope. Your music within can provide a fermata¹ holding space for memories and meanings, and a gentle release into renewal.

It’s About Life

What music sings your emotions and thoughts? What music resonates with your core self, deep within? What music helps you experience and express life more fully? What music shifts you to a different space-place from where you would be had you not experienced the music? What music transforms something within you?

Heads up. A theme of this book is that music of the soul is about life. Music sings out lullaby laughter and funeral fears, and every life experience in between. It teaches language (“ABCDEFG…”) and woos new love. Music marks time through the ages and for all ages: from cave-men’s drumming to today’s L.A. Hood raps; and from ancient Egyptian flutes playing homage to pharaohs to today’s American Idol craze for 15 minutes of fame. This book’s music is about one’s own life music that communicates an essence of one’s “who I am” in the past and future, and especially now in the present.

For centuries, philosophers, musicians, and consumers have debated the age-old question: what music is best? Is it music for art’s sake, or music that brings fame and fortune, or music that presents one’s religious or political stance, or music that simply endures? Different answers lie in the perceptions of each reader. I ask: what music guides you toward knowing and understanding yourself better — toward expressing and enriching your life? Is it classical music, folk, rock, religious, new age, or something else? Is it a particular style, artist, or title?

While musicologists, critics, and popular music publishers endlessly debate criteria for defining good versus bad music, this author evaluates “music of the soul” using wholly (and “holy”) different criteria. Good or bad music of the soul is less about the music and more about the person. The value is not in the music, but in the person’s response to the music. It is found when the music shifts from being notes and sounds to stirring meaning within. Such music cannot be forced upon another. Instead, the music sensitively engages and empowers the person.

For you, what music has expressed your grief in the past? What music, today, can take you to places of loss and grief in the present? What music, for you, renews hope?

Music and Mourning

Nearly every civilization, culture, and religion exemplifies the use of music at times of loss and grief. Historical sound bytes from my Western civilization’s backyard include:

• Plato (429–347 BCE), who emphasized music education for children, requested that musicians play at his funeral to protect his friends from sorrow and dejection (Hall, 1982, pp. 7–8).
• The nursery song, “Ring around the rosy, pockets full of posies/Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” often is attributed to fear of the bubonic plague in England, in 1665, when “posies” of flowers were carried to ward off the odors of death (which were thought to carry the disease), and “ashes” having referred to either dead bodies or “attishoo” for sneezing, a symptom of the disease.
• Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Opus 11 (1936), familiar to baby boomers from the movie Platoon, was played at the funerals of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. On today’s news reports, portions of this work are often used to create audio backgrounds for somber photojournalism reflections (Barber, 1989).
• Louis Armstrong’s classic “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” voiced new meaning on Friday, September 2, 2005 (Armstrong, 2004). For days on end we witnessed flood, famine, and fear. New Orleans’s sons, daughters, and adopted residents were leaving on bus after bus. Most could not know whom and what they were leaving, where they were going, or for how long. Harry Con-nick, Jr. poignantly sang this song to the world for his hometown, his family (his father had been mayor), and his dispersed community. Aaron Neville sang “Louisiana 1927,” a ballad about an earlier devastating flood (Newman, 1974). Later in the TV broadcast, New Orleans musician Wynton Marsalis and others joined Harry in playing Dixieland jazz, calling all to life in the midst of overwhelming sorrow. The New Yorker magazine captured New Orleans’s musical soul on its cover with art titled, “Requiem” (Jaun, 2005). A solitary sax player plays on from a pier overlooking street signs of a flooded Bourbon Street.
• The list goes on. Many musical forms express grief and loss, flowing from ancient Greek odes through today’s rap: the elegy, threnody, nenia, lament, planctus, dirge, troubadour songs, deploration, dumpe, plainte, requiem, spirituals, blues, hymns, folk songs, tragic opera, and ah, yes, country ballads. (More examples are provided in Appendix A, “Through the Ages: A Time Line of Western Grief Music.”)

Music written or performed out of the musician’s grief, and in turn evoking powerful responses in others can be found in virtually any Western music genre. Consider:

• Beethoven’s dark “Tempest” Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Opus 32 was written in the same months as his Heiligenstadter Testament, a suicide note, dated October 6, 1802. He was 32 when he wrote the letter, he had been losing his hearing for six years, a period when he was at the height of his musical career. In the testament he described his void, despair, and isolation from social life. Contrast this music with the joyful triumph of his 1827 “Ode to Joy” from his Symphony No. 9, No. 125 in D minor, Opus 125, composed in complete deafness. Musically, it juxtaposes both “horror” and “joy” themes. Its finale choral text (by Friedrich Schiller) celebrates the union of all mankind. Beethoven’s mourning was transformed to the joy of morning.
• The beloved gospel song, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” was written by Thomas Dorsey in a moment of heartbreak. While performing in St. Louis, his wife Nettie died in childbirth, far away in Chicago, and his newborn son died soon after. Upon learning the news, he penned this text. It was 1932, during the Great Depression. His personal prayer rapidly captured a country’s struggles and hopes. He gave voice to those who felt tired, weak, and worn. His vivid imagery of storms and of night portrayed ongoing struggles of the era. He wrote as one who was well-acquainted with death and dying. He prayed to go “home” (Dorsey, 1933/1981). Connecting with countless personal stories, ”Precious Lord, Take My Hand” has been recorded by such greats as Mahalia Jackson, Elvis Presley, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin. Decades later, it continues to be a favorite for funerals.
• Pink Floyd’s popular, psychedelic “Wish You Were Here” (Floyd, 1975/2000a), was an ode to their former band leader Syd Barrett, who had left the band in 1968 due to repeated psychiatric crises. Another musical tribute to Syd, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” explicitly deals with the aftermath of Syd’s breakdown (Floyd, 1975/2000b).
• Eric Clapton’s 1992 Grammy-winning “Tears in Heaven” (Clap-ton, 1992), was written for his 4-year old son, Conor, who died in a tragic fall from a 49th-floor Manhattan apartment in March 1991. Only months earlier, in August 1990, one of Eric’s guitarists and two road crew members were killed in a helicopter crash.
• Tim McGraw’s 2004 country song “Live Like You Were Dying” was recorded shortly after his father, Tug McGraw, died. It celebrates life anew because of facing death. In an interview, Tim described: “We were rehearsing when Tug was sick, and he died at the beginning of January. We were in the studio at the end of January, and we recorded this around 11:00 or 12:00 at night and everybody just poured a lot of heart and soul into it. I think you can hear that on the record” (Tim McGraw Official Page at GACTV.com, 2004). It became one of the fastest to-the-top singles ever on the market, and was named the 2004 Country Music “Song of the Year” (Nicols … Wiseman, 2004).

The list goes on. Listen further. Beyond your backyard. Over the river and through the woods past grandmother’s house to others’ homelands. World music examples of funerals and mourning include:

• funeral drums of Ghana;
• famadihana rituals in Madagascar;
• Mexico’s annual “Day of the Dead” festival;
• the qawwali Sufi songs in Pakistan;
• the kobi panpipe orchestra of New Guinea;
• the bajhan Hindu devotional songs used throughout the mourning period;
• the Chinese Buddhist sheng-guan;
• the bird songs of the Hualapai Native Americans;
• the Zari folk song laments of Georgia;
• the jazz band funerals of New Orleans;
• and the Ashkenazic Jewish memorial prayer, Eyl Male Rakhamin. (Many audio examples can found on Dancing with the Dead, Charno, 1998.)

Perhaps, even with our diverse dialects, are we more alike than different? Perhaps, when foreign languages separate us from dialogue, can experiencing each other’s music bond us together? (In my head the African-American spiritual sings out, “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.”

Music for Being in and Moving through Grief

Throughout this book, we will discover music’s comfort. We will delve into the stinging sorrow she can evoke. We will venture into the memories and meanings she can stir. We will define ways to use music to help us be in and move through mourning.

Music happens in the moment. Hear. Here. It sounds and moves on. Its sounds form patterns that, like an intricate web, create easy access to emotions, thoughts, memories, physical sensations, and meanings.

While music exists in the “hear” and now, it can call up the past. You are flooded with emotions and long-forgotten memories. You may feel warmed, lost, grateful, and deeply sad, all at the same time. You are reeled into previous experiences of this music, and you are faced with how life is different now.

Music can catapult us into the future. A song’s text or context may confront you at undefended, emotional portals. Your silent fears, hopes, or beliefs about your future find voice. You have a powerful moment to be present to yourself. In your inner web of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual responses, you have a myriad of directions in which you can choose to move.

Our journey through this book is less about an individual piece of music, and more about our experience of music. Too often, well-meaning people “prescribe” a particular piece of music without realizing they are trying to impose their own style and preference on another person. We will examine principles and techniques to focus on empowering the grieving person.

Our explorations will be grounded in contemporary loss–grief theory, music therapy research, music history examples, case studies, and reflective teaching exercises. Case studies represent this author’s professional roles as musician, music therapist, and chaplain. Names and identifying facts are changed, except for those stories about Amy, Judy, and Rahul. Concepts remain consistent. Teaching exercises provide tools for you, the reader, to incorporate uses of music within (1) your personal life journey, and (2) your professional role with persons in loss and grief.

Music of the Soul: Terminology and Metaphors

Beethoven proclaimed, “Music should strike fire within” (Crofton … Fraser, 1985, p. 58). I applaud. For persons in grief and loss, I caution: Does that fire warm or burn? Heal or harm? Scorch or fuel? We will explore these dynamics.

The phrase music of the soul denotes this ineffable quality of music to strike fire within. Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, and Einstein all contemplated music’s profound powers (Crofton … Fraser, 1985; Einstein, 1917/1969; Einstein, 1941). Composers and musicologists have theorized about these phenomena for centuries. Words such as soul, transformation, and life-changing hold a spiritual quality. Though music therapy as a discipline has investigated music from an empirical, scientific, behavioral perspective, numerous music therapists demonstrate a shift toward integrating spiritual, transforming, relati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Music of the Soul — Composing Life Out of Loss
• Chapter 2: Rhythms of Body and Soul
• Chapter 3: Themes and Counterthemes of Life Stories
• Chapter 4: Harmonies and Dissonances of Healing
• Chapter 5: Styles of Doing and Being
• Chapter 6: Expressions of Self and Community
• Chapter 7: The Final Cadence
• Chapter 8: Composing Life Out of Loss
• Appendix A: Through the Ages: A Timeline of Western Grief Music
• Appendix B: My Music Menu
• Appendix C: Keyboard Quality of Life: “Highs” and “Lows”
• Appendix D: My Do-Be-Do-Be’s
• Appendix E: CORE Principles (Being) and HEALing Techniques (Doing)
• Teaching Guides:
• Notes
• Books and Articles
• Scores, Recordings, and Videos
• Websites
• Index