Essays on the Origins of Western Music
by
David Whitwell
Essay Nr. 33: On Early Accounts of Music Therapy
Apollo was the Greek god of both music and medicine.
Antonio Lido, 14th century professor of medicine at the University of Padua,
had an epitaph which began, Musicus Artista….
Within the general subject of the impact of music upon the physiology of
man there are extraordinary testimonials and references to the use of music to heal
the sick. In this essay we shall concentrate on accounts relating to external physical
ailments, as well as melancholy and madness. The next essay will deal only with the
use of music to soothe the temporarily agitated mind.
Among the ancient philosophers one finds a great variety of physical illnesses
reported to have been cured by music. Of these, no doubt the accounts most
familiar to the contemporary reader are those dealing with the bite of the spider.
We will offer a few examples of such testimony, beginning with two Renaissance
references which offer some interesting detail. Vicenzo Giustiniani, who left
valuable accounts of 16th century Italian performance practices, mentions the use of
music in Puglia and Naples for persons who have been bitten by Tarantulas and he
assures us that the effect of the use of music “is found to be greater than the
remedies the doctors give.” It is particularly interesting that he suggests that not
just any music will work, but only something rather specific.
1
they received great solace and many times total relief from music or the
sound of instruments; and what is even more amazing, from one particular
kind of music or instrument.1
Baldassare Castiglione (1478 – 1529), in his famous book, The Courtier (Il
Cortigiano), adds more information on the individual nature of the cure.
They say in Apulia when someone is bitten by a tarantula many
musical instruments are played and various tunes are tried until the humor2
which is causing the sickness all of a sudden responds to the sound with
which it has a certain affinity and so agitates the sick man that he is shaken
back into good health.
Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), a German born scholar who spent most of
his adult life in Rome, was the author of the Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650), a
virtual encyclopedia of music. In Book Nine of this massive work, “The Magic of
Consonance and Dissonance,” Kircher discusses the effects of music on the mind
and the use of music therapy, including the use of music to cure the bite of the
Tarantula spider. Kircher cites several histories of this phenomenon, including a
girl who was bitten and was cured by the music of only a drum. In another case,
however, he reports a volunteer allowed himself to be bitten by two Tarantulas, of
different colors. As the bite of one responded to music and dance, but the bite of the
other was made worse, the patient died. Kircher’s technical medical explanation
reads,
The poison is sharp, gnawing, and bilious and is received and
incorporated into the medullary substances of the fibers. The music has the
power to rarefy the air to a certain harmonic pitch; the air thus rarefied,
penetrating the pores of the patient’s body, affects the muscles, arteries, and
minute fibers, and incites him to dance, which begets a perspiration, in which
the poison evaporates.
In an earlier book, Magnes siue De arte magnetica opus tripartitum (Rome,
1641) Kircher also discusses “the magnetic power and faculties of music” and “the
affections of the mind which music excites.” Here again, of particular interest is a
special science which he calls “Tarantism,” the study of the “magnetism and
amazing sympathy with music” of the Tarantula.
1
Vicenzo Giustiniani, Discorso sopra la Musica (c. 1628), trans., Carol MacClintock (American
Institute of Musicology, 1962), 74.
2 In a previous essay, Nr. 27, on the “Doctrine of the Affections,” we discuss the “Humors.”
2
The great German commentator on Baroue performance practice, Johann
Mattheson, cites a publication, Quintessence des Novelles, 1727, Nr. 18,3 which
contains the music of a Rondo recommended for use as a cure for the bite of the
Tarantula spider.
Finally, we have a testimonial of a physician, the Jacobean English doctor,
Sir Thomas Browne. He has no doubt that these ancient tales are true.
Some doubt many have of the tarantula, or poisonous spider of
Calabria, and that magical cure of the bit thereof by music. But since we
observe that many attest it from experience; since the learned Kircherus
has positively averred it, and set down the songs and tunes solemnly used
for it; since some also affirm the tarantula itself will dance upon certain
strokes, whereby they set their instruments against its poison, we shall not
at all question it.4
Curiously, of all the physical ailments for which music received credit as
being able to cure, the one most often mentioned by ancient philosophers was
madness. An important early reference is found in the most important book on
music of the 5th century, the allegorical description of “The Marriage of Philology
and Mercury,” by Martianus Capella. This work is a defense of the importance of
the seven liberal arts, which were by this time established in the Roman schools.
These were the Trivium, consisting of Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, and the
Quadrivium, consisting of Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music [here called
by an ancient synonym, “Harmony”]. The book was written at a time when
Christianity had not yet won its final battle against the “pagans” and might well be
thought of as an attempt to fight back against the efforts of the new Church to shut
down traditional education and knowledge. This book represents one of the efforts
which helped keep the liberal arts alive during the “Dark Ages.” Regarding
madness, in this book the allegorical character, Music, speaks,
I have frequently recited chants that have had a therapeutic effect
upon deranged minds and ailing bodies; I have restored the mad to health
3
Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739), trans., Ernest Harriss (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1981), I, iii, 43
4 “Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors,” in Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, ed., Simon Wilkin
(London: Pickering, 1836), II, 536.
3
through consonance, a treatment which the physician Asclepiades learned
from me.5
The 13th century philosopher, Bartholomew Anglicus mentions the use of
music in writing of the treatment of madness. Those suffering from madness must
be tied up, so they will not hurt themselves or others, and then,
be refreshed, and comforted, and withdrawn from cause and matter of dread
and busy thoughts. And they must be gladded with instruments of music,
and some what be occupied.6
The great Renaissance philosopher, Erasmus (1466 – 1536) attributed the
discovery that music could cure madness to the famous ancient Greek philosopher,
Pythagoras.
Pythagoras, by playing spondees in the Phrygian mode, transformed a
young man mad with love and restored his sanity. A similar story is told of
Empedocles, who is said by the use of some particular musical modes to have
recalled to his proper wits a young man already beside himself with rage and
hell-bent on murder.7
The 16th century Church philosopher, Jean Bodin, following the official
Church view, arrives at a startling conclusion, that improvisation in music drives
men mad!
Harmony weakened and overdone by excessive elaboration exerts an
influence, for while one both simple and natural is wont to cure serious
illness of the mind, on the contrary one contrived from a medley of sounds
and rapid rhythms usually drives a mind insane. This happens to men too
anxious to please their ears, who dislike the Doric mode and dignified
measures. They affect the Ionian, so that it ought not to seem remarkable if
many become insane.8
In another place, in writing of the “Humors,” in particular the influence of blood
and black bile, he reports how this cure is effected in Germany.
In Lower Germany there are almost none who are mad from black
bile, but rather from blood; this type of lunacy the common man calls the
5
Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, trans., William Harris Stahl and Richard Johnson
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 358.
6 “Medieval Medicine,” In Medieval Lore, trans., Robert Steele (London: Stock, 1893), 58.
7 Letter to Adrian VI [1522], in quoted in The Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1992), IX, 145ff.
8 Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans., Beatrice Reynolds (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1945), 31.
4
disease of St. Vitus, which impels them to exultation and senseless dancing.
Musicians imitate this on the lyre; afterwards they make use of more serious
rhythms and modes, doing this gradually until by the gravity of the mode
and the rhythm the madmen are clearly soothed.9
In English literature of the Renaissance we notice a line in a poem by Sir
John Davies (1569 – 1626), “Orchestra, or A Poem of Dancing,” which we take to
refer to the reputation of music to alleviate madness. Here he calls music “the sick
mind’s leech.”10 The only such reference in Shakespeare seems to suggest that
music, instead, causes madness! In Richard II, the imprisoned king, having heard
some music, says,
This music mads me. Let it sound no more,
For though it have helped mad men to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad….11
One of the earliest books of the Baroque, “The City of the Sun (1602), by
Tommaso Campanella, describes a fictional, utopian society.12 The uses of music
found in this society include a brief reference to music therapy, for the cure of
“burning fevers.”
Robert Burton (1577 – 1640), in his famous book, The Anatomy of
Melancholy, has an extended discussion regarding the use of music for the cure of
madness. Here, however, like the cure of the spider bite, it is the combination of
dance with music which he advocates. When he lists what he considers the basic
“diseases of the mind,” among “Dotage, Phrenzy, Madness, Hydrophobia, and
Llycanthropia,” we are surprised to find “St. Vitus’ Dance.” His discussion of this
condition is rather interesting.
S. Vitus’ Dance; the lascivious dance, Paracelsus calls it, because they
that are taken with it, can do nothing but dance till they be dead, or cured. It
is so called, for that the parties so troubled were wont to go to S. Vitus for
help, & after they had danced there a while, they were certainly freed. It is
strange to hear how long they will dance, & in what manner, over stools,
forms, tables; even great-bellied women sometimes (and yet never hurt their
9
Ibid., 103.
Sir John Davies (1569-1626), “Orchestra or A Poem of Dancing,” in in Emrys Jones, ed., The
New Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 652ff.
11 Richard II, V, v.
12 Tommaso Campanella, La Citta del Sole, trans., Daniel Donno (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1981), 41.
10
5
children) will dance so long that they can stir neither hand nor foot, but seem
to be quite dead. Only in red clothes they cannot abide. Musick above all
things they love, & therefore Magistrates in Germany will hire Musicians to
play to them, and some lusty sturdy companions to dance with them. This
disease hath been very common in Germany, as appears by those relations of
Sckenkius, and Paracelsus in his book of Madness, who brags how many
several persons he hath cured of it. Felix Platerus reports of a woman in
Basle whom he saw, that danced a whole month together.13
His English contemporary, Abraham Cowley, also has left an interesting
observation on the use of music to cure madness. He began by reviewing several of
the more familiar anecdotes in ancient literature in which music affected behavior.
But music therapy is more than this.
Neither should we wonder, that passions should be raised or
suppressed.... But that it should cure settled diseases in the body, we should
hardly believe, if we had not both human and divine testimony for it.14
Cowley then adds, in addition to the testimony in the Old Testament, the wellknown and documented instances in which music had cured the poison left by the
bite of the Tarantula spider. But how does one explain it? He arrives at the
unusual explanation that it is not music per se, but, according to an earlier author,
the instrument on which the music is performed which is the agent for the cure of
madness.
For the explication of the reason of these cures, the Magicians fly to
their Colcodea; the Platonicks to their Anima Mundi; the Rabbis to Fables
and Prodigies not worth the repeating. Baptista Porta in his Natural Magick,
seems to attribute it to the Magical Power of the Instrument, rather than of
the Musick; for he says, that Madness is to be cured by the Harmony of a
Pipe made of Hellobore, because the juice of that plant is held good for that
purpose….
His explanation for this cure reads like something which might have been written by
the ancient Greek philosophers,
That Musick moves the spirits to act upon the soul, as medicines do to
operate upon the body, and that it cures the body by the soul, as medicine
does the soul by the body.
13
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed., Floyd Dell (New York: Tudor Publishing
Company, 1938), 124.
14 Ibid., 67.
6
It was also in this vein that Cassiodorus (480 – 573 AD), in a famous letter to
Boethius, describes the process by which music heals. He then points to the effect of
music on a host of mental illnesses, beginning with melancholy.
The artist changes men’s hearts as they listen; and, when this artful
pleasure issues from the secret place of nature as the queen of the senses, in
all the glory of its tones, our remaining thoughts take to flight, and it expels
all else, that it may delight itself simply in being heard. Harmful melancholy
he turns to pleasure; he weakens swelling rage; he makes bloodthirsty
cruelty kindly, arouses sleepy sloth from its torpor, restores to the sleepless
their wholesome rest, recalls lust-corrupted chastity to its moral resolve, and
heals boredom of spirit which is always the enemy of good thoughts.
Dangerous hatreds he turns to helpful goodwill, and, in a blessed kind of
healing, drives out the passions of the heart by means of sweetest pleasures.15
Beginning with the late Renaissance one reads more about those suffering
from being melancholic. Henry Peacham (1576 – 1643), in his book, The Complete
Gentleman, declares that music is “the best physic for many melancholy diseases.”16
Johann Mattheson not only reviews many of the anecdotes of the healing
powers of music found in ancient literature, but he also provides some
contemporary examples.17 He says he received a letter from the queen of Spain in
1737 in which she testifies that her husband was completely cured of “black
melancholy” by her having organized a concert every evening before dinner. So
impressed was the king, that he began to study music himself.18 He also cites the
Leipziger Zeitungen von gelehrten Sachen, 1733, page 626, which discusses his own
father being cured of melancholy by music, all other remedies having been in vain.
Robert Burton (1577 – 1640), in his famous book on melancholy devotes a
brief chapter to music.19 There have been many means by which philosophers and
physicians have attempted to “exhilarate a sorrowful heart,” he notes, but for him
there is nothing so powerful as “a cup of strong drink, mirth, musick, and merry
15
Letter to Boethius, in Variae, trans., Thomas Hodgkin (London: Frowde, 1886)., II, xl.
Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, ed., Virgil Heltzel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1962), 116.
17 Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739), trans., Ernest Harriss (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1981), I, iii, 43.
18 Ibid., I, iii, 45.
19 Burton, Op. cit., 478ff.
16
7
company.”20 After citing some high recommendations of music by ancient writers,
Burton observes,
Musick is a tonic to the saddened soul, a [powerful cannon] against
melancholy, to rear and revive the languishing soul, affecting not only the
ears, but the very arteries, the vital and animal spirits; it erects the mind,
and makes it nimble. This it will effect in the most dull, severe, and
sorrowful souls, expel grief with mirth, and if there be any clouds, dust, or
dregs of cares yet lurking in our thoughts, most powerfully it wipes them all
away, and that which is more, it will perform all this in an instant: cheer up
the countenance, expel austerity, bring in hilarity, inform our manners,
mitigate anger.... Our divine Musick, not only to expel the greatest griefs,
but it doth extenuate fears and furies, appeases cruelty, abates heaviness, and
to such as are watchful it causes quiet rest; it takes away spleen and hatred,
be it instrumental, vocal, with strings, or wind; it leads us by the spirit, it
cures all irksomeness and heaviness of the soul.
Music accomplishes this, he maintains, because,
In a word, it is so powerful a thing that it ravishes the soul, the Queen
of the senses, by sweet pleasure (which is a happy cure) and corporal tunes,
pacifies our incorporeal soul, and rules it without words, and carries it
beyond itself, helps, elevates, extends it.
But now he warns there are some men made melancholic by music and in these cases
more music can make their condition worse, escalating it from melancholy to
madness! He concludes this passage by pointing out, on the other hand, that there is
such a thing as “pleasing melancholy,” which he seems not to consider dangerous.
And what young man is not [pleased with music]? As it is acceptable
and conducing to most, so especially to a melancholy man; provided always,
his disease proceed not originally from it, that he be not some light
Inamorato, some idle phantastick, who capers in conceit all the day long, and
thinks of nothing else but how to make Jigs, Sonnets, Madrigals, in
commendation of his mistress. In such cases Musick is most pernicious, as a
spur to a free horse will make him run himself blind, or break his wind; for
Musick enchants, as Menander holds, it will make such melancholy persons
mad, and the sound of those Jigs and Horn-pipes will not be removed out of
the ears a week after.... Many men are melancholy by hearing Musick, but it
is a pleasing melancholy that it causes, and therefore to such as are
discontent, in woe, fear, sorrow, or dejected, it is a most present remedy; it
expels cares, alters their grieved minds, and eases in an instant.
20
Ibid., 478ff.
8
There is one more reference to melancholy among the Jacobean plays, but in
this case, in Thomas Dekker’s (born 1570) The Wonder of a Kingdom (III, ii), a
nurse rejects the idea of music therapy.
The Duke of Florence. Call for the Musicke.
Angelo. Makea no noise, but bring in de Fidlers, and play sweet-Nurse. Oh out upon this Doctor; hang him, does he think to cure
dejected Ladies with Fidlers –
Aside from the more conspicuous madness and melancholy, the early
philosophers write of music’s ability to help with a wide variety of other mental
illnesses. Iamblichus (c. 250 – 325 AD) records the techniques of Pythagoras in
using music to alleviate a number of primarily emotional disorders. It is no doubt
this passage which has caused some more recent scholars to regard Pythagoras as
“the Father of Music Therapy.”21
Pythagoras conceived the first attention that should be given to men
should be addressed to the senses, as when one perceives beautiful figures
and forms, or hears beautiful rhythms and melodies. Consequently he laid
down that the first erudition was that which subsists through music’s
melodies and rhythms, and from these he obtained remedies of human
manners and passions, and restored the pristine harmony of the faculties of
the soul. Moreover, he devised medicines calculated to repress and cure the
diseases of both bodies and souls. Here is also by Zeus, something which
deserves to be mentioned above all: namely, that for his disciples he arranged
and adjusted what might be called “preparations” and “touchings,” divinely
contriving mingling of certain diatonic, chromatic and enharmonic melodies,
through which he easily switched and circulated the passions of the soul in a
contrary direction, whenever they had accumulated recently, irrationally, or
clandestinely -- such as sorrow, rage, pity, over-emulation, fear, manifold
desires, angers, appetites, pride, collapse or spasms. Each of these he
corrected by the rule of virtue, attempering them through appropriate
melodies, as through some salutary medicine.
Capella (5th century), whom we have mentioned above, points to examples of
using music to work with mentally disturbed and insane patients, not to mention an
extraordinarily diverse list of other kinds of patients.
Have not I myself brought healing to diseased bodies by prolonged
therapy? The ancients were able to cure fever and wounds by incantation.
21
Iamblichus, in Kenneth Guthrie, The Pythagorean Sourcebook (Grand Rapids: Phanes Press,
1987).
9
Asclepiades healed with the trumpet patients who were stone deaf, and
Theophrastus used the flute with mentally disturbed patients. Is anyone
unaware that gout in the hip is removed by the sweet tones of the aulos?
Xenocrates cured insane patients by playing on musical instruments. Thales
of Crete is known to have dispelled diseases and pestilence by the sweetness
of his cithara playing. Herophilus checked the pulse of his patients by
comparing rhythms.22
The rather extraordinary claim that music can cure the deaf was also argued
by the very important English philosopher, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln
(1170 – 1253). Indeed, he regarded healing as being music’s highest purpose.
McEvoy summarizes Grosseteste’s explanation for the process by which music
heals.
The soul follows the body in the latter’s affections, and the body
follows the soul’s actions. When, therefore, the body is affected by sounding
numbers, the soul draws out of itself numbers which are of the same
proportion, and the spirits adjust the proportions of the numbers to
agreement. The wise doctor must therefore have a knowledge of the due
proportion of the body as impressed on it by the stars, and must be
acquainted with the proportions which induce concord among the elements
and the humid parts of the principal spirits, and between the soul and the
body. When these proportions are expressed in terms of musical sound,
upon the numbers’ reaching the soul everything in man returns to a
proportioned state. The doctor must also have studied the behavior of the
spirits prevailing in different emotional states, such as in joy, when they
dilate, and sadness, when they contract; for the states of the soul too can be
affected by the knowledgeable employment of musical sound.23
Not all observers could believe such extraordinary claims, especially the idea
that music could cure the deaf. Francois Rabelais, in his fictional visit to the
kingdom of “Quint Essence,” makes fun of the entire idea. Here the visitors were
told the queen cures all maladies just by playing an appropriate song. In the
demonstration given the visitors, first lepers were brought in.
She played them a tune, but what one I don’t know. Instantly they
were perfectly cured. Then the poisoned were brought in; she played them
another tune, and they were on their feet. Then the blind, the deaf, the mute,
treating them similarly, which terrified us, not wrongly, and we fell to the
ground, prostrating ourselves as people in ecstasy and rapt in contemplation
22
Martianus Capella Op. cit., 358. Marchetto of Padua, 14th century, in his Lucidarium, also
mentions that physicians judge the pulse by the aid of music.
23 James McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982),, 257ff.
10
of the powers we saw emanating from the Lady; and it was not in our power
to say a single word.24
Some more rather general references to music therapy include a passage
found in Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 – 1375). In the seventh story of the tenth day, in
The Decameron, one sings a song, accompanied by a viol, to a girl with the result
that,
she was so rejoiced and so content that she straightaway showed manifest
signs of great improvement....25
Johann Mattheson cites the Observations de Medecine sur la maladie, appellee
convulsions par un Medecine de la Faculte de Paris, a Paris, 1732, xii, 32, which
contains “examples of music helping sick people to health.”26
There is a rather unusual poem by Abraham Cowley (1618 – 1667) in which
he describes the “music of the spheres,” including this nice thought,
And this is Musick; sounds that charm our ears,
Are but one dressing that rich science wears.
He goes on to make the case that everything on earth is impacted by this celestial
music, including his own poetry. This relationship, which he also compares to the
sympathetic vibration of the strings on a lyre, he gives as a metaphor for how music
cures the patient.
Though no man heard it, though no man rehearse,
Yet will there still be musick in my verse.
In this great world so much of it we see;
The lesser, man, is all over harmony.
Storehouse of all proportions! single Choir!
Which first God’s breath did tunefully inspire!27
From hence blessed musick’s heavenly charms arise,
From sympathy which them and to man allies.
Thus they our souls, thus they our bodies win.
Not by their force, but party that’s within.
Thus the strange cure on our split blood applied,
Sympathy to the distant wound does guide.
24
Francois Rabelais, Pantagruel, trans., Donald Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991), V, xix.
25 The Decameron, trans., Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella (New York: Norton, 1977), 193. II,
740.
26 Mattheson, Op. cit., I, iii, 43.
27 “Inspire,” at this time in England was a synonym for “to blow,” as to inspire a flute.
11
Thus when two brethren strings are set alike,
To move them both, but one of them we strike.
Thus David’s lyre did Saul’s wild rage control,
And tuned the harsh disorders of his soul.28
There is a nice passage in the most famous play by the English Jacobean
playwrights, Beaumont and Fletcher, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (II, i), in
which music’s cure is of a distinctly psychological one. Here an old merchant
predicts that one who laughs and sings will be protected from a wide variety of
illness.
Let each man keep his heart at ease
No man dies of that disease,
He that would his body keep
From diseases, must not weep,
But whoever laughs and sings,
Never his body brings
Into Fevers, Gouts, or Rhumes,
Or lingeringly his Lungs consumes:
Or meets with aches in the bone,
Or Catarrhs, or griping Stone....
Another example of the result of music’s cure being of a psychological nature is
found in John Dryden’s (1631 – 1700) The Indian Queen (III, ii), when Ismeron calls
for music for the purpose of helping Zempoalla.
You Spirits that inhabit in the Air,
With all your powerful Charms of Musick try
To bring her Soul back to its harmony.
A curious negative reference to music’s affect on the body is found in a
Restoration poem by William Wycherley (1641 – 1715),
Your verse, like your prescriptions, is so mean,
That, like bad Musick, it provokes the Spleen.29
This reference to such a specific organ as the spleen, calls to mind Theophrastus of
Eresus, 372-287 BC, a disciple of Aristotle, who wrote that a person suffering from
sciatica would always be free from attacks if one played the aulos in the Phrygian
“Davideis,” in Alexander Grosart, ed., The Complete Works of Abraham Cowley (New York:
AMS Press, 1967), I, 49.
29 “To a Doctor of Physick, on his Writing a Satyr against Wit,” in The Complete Works of William
Wycherley (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), IV,.
28
12
mode over the part of the body affected?30 And in the passage quoted above by
Abraham Cowley, he adds that “the Sciatique nerve is helped by playing on a
musical instrument made of Poplar, because of the virtue of the Oil of that tree to
mitigate those kinds of pains.”
Finally, there are several interesting references in the early literature
regarding the use of music for pain in general. For example in Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queen, we read,
And all the while most heavenly melody
About the bed sweet music did divide,
Him to beguile of grief and agony....31
Another Englishman, George Wither (1588 – 1667), also was thinking of some
remote time, writing of “He that first taught his Musicke such a strain,”
He in his troubles eased the body’s pains,
By measures raised to the souls ravishing....32
Johann Mattheson mentions two accounts of pain being treated by music.
One of these regards a professor at Gottingen who attributed the alleviation of pain
in limbs with the effect music has on muscles. A particularly interesting report is
that the 17th century native Americans (Indians),
use no other means than their somewhat coarse method of playing, by means
of which they occasionally suppress and alleviate difficult infirmities and
pains if not heal them....33
We have seen a number of these accounts of healing through music make
reference to the sympathetic vibrations between strings. For the ancient
philosophers this was a metaphor for the body and soul and by treating the soul
through music you could treat the body. The Italian philosopher who founded the
famous academy at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificant in 15th century Florence,
worked as a healer using certain musical proportions based on the lyre.34 Similarly,
On Inspiration, quoted in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae., XIV, 624. Plutarch, in “Concerning the
Virtues of Women,” also tells of a sickly woman who was healed by the study of music.
31 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book I, Canto V, xvii.
32 Wither, Spenser Society Nr. 10, “The Shepheards Hunting,” 506.
33 Mattheson, Op. Cit., I, iii, 47. He quotes Francois La Mothe le Vayer, Oeuvres de Francois de
la Mothe le Vayer (Paris, 1656), I, 521.
34 Stuart Isacoff, Temperament (New York: Vintage, 2003), 112.
30
13
Bartolomeo Ramos de Pareja, inspired by Arabic texts in Spain, was convinced that
certain musical scales had to power to affect sluggishness and various emotions.
“Music works miracles,” he asserted.35
Today we are more likely to speak of the “spirit,” rather than the soul. But,
while “spirit” may have meaning for musicians, it only makes doctors nervous.
Medical doctors today do not deal with “the spirit,” they deal with body parts.
That we do not speak their language is one reason why medical doctors give only
polite respect to music therapy.
But healing through music does occur. We know, first-hand, of some
medical conditions in which a music therapist accomplished what a medical doctor
could not. We must expend more effort in identifying the physical basis for the role
music plays in such cases. This would certainly result in greater recognition among
doctors. One only has to reflect, for example, that music understanding is not only
entirely physiological, but much of it is genetic. There must be some common links
with medical understanding, for the body and everything about it is also
physiological and genetic.
Is the primary link one of vibrations? As a possible illustration, the great
composer Arthur Honegger once recalled the report of an interview with a Dr. J.
Niemack, one of the doctors who treated Beethoven for his deafness. Dr. Niemack
found that the Cavatina of the String Quartet, Op. 130, in which the first violin, in a
strangely broken rhythm, gives voice to a melodic line marked by Beethoven as
“Beklemmt” (anguished). Dr. Niemack continues,
Ask a cardiologist to listen to this passage and ask him if he recognizes
this rhythm. “Naturally,” he will answer, “It is the heart-beat of an
arteriosclerotic,” whose heart is affected by a compensatory insufficiency.36
Is the link along the similar lines of work being done by Dr. Hans Jenny in
Switzerland, with fellow physicists, using the vibrations of musical tones to affect
(retune) the molecules of organs (which are also pitched!)?
35
36
Ibid.
Arthur Honegger, I am a Composer (Faber & Faber, 1966), 67.
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Or is the link found on the long neglected experiential/emotional side of our
personality? Certainly the non-rational facets of music are of that domain of the
brain, and far removed from the data dominant domain of doctors.
It should be obvious to all that there are great areas of research which in the
past have not interested the medical profession. But the research which identifies
and explains medically what role music actually plays in healing is unlikely to be
done by the medical community. Instead, the field of music therapy itself must be
much more active in the basic research which explains scientifically how music
cures. Music therapists must not only continue beating doctors at their own game,
that is effecting healing where the medical profession cannot, but these cases must
be vigorously reported and the practitioners honored. Music therapy must argue its
own case, for only in this way will music therapy ever become fully recognized by
the medical profession. After all, the other branches of medicine also had, at some
earlier time, to make their own case. If the discipline of surgery had not done this,
for example, then surgery would still be conducted by barbers.
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