Sound Healing, East to West Part III

Can music really heal us?

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In Parts I and II we discussed frequencies and sounds as healing modalities, but what about...actual music? Can music really heal us?

After World War II a group of professional musicians in the U.S. began volunteering in the V.A. hospitals to help returning veterans pass the time. It wasn't meant to be a healing modality in the traditional sense–the goal was entertainment. The musicians were surprised to find that as a result of listening to music, the veterans’ depressions were gradually lifted and their socialization skills improved. These observations were the beginnings of the field of Music Therapy. Paul Nordoff and Clive Robbins were pioneers in the field, developing a program of therapy for retarded, emotionally disturbed and otherwise handicapped children using musical improvisation to respond to the child’s emotional needs. In the words of Nordoff and Robbins, “Autistic or psychotic children and those with severe brain injury are largely cut off from communication in life. . . it is an everyday experience that handicapped children like music, that music gets through to them; it is demonstrable that many are able to partake in musical activities with considerable freedom from pathological impairment.”

When I lived in New York I had a pianist/vocalist friend, Amy Begel, whom I knew from Barry Harris' classes at the Jazz Cultural Theatre. Inspired by the life wisdom Barry would spontaneously share in the classes, Amy began incorporating 'jazz consultations' into her family therapy practice. I did a few of them for her. Usually a duo, often horn and guitar, would sit behind the one-way mirror during a couple's consultation. Then we would join them in the consult room and play our impressions of the dynamic between the couple. I remember one couple where the husband was a hedge fund manager. His actual dream of following his favorite bands around the country as they performed live made quite the dichotomy between his dream life and his actual life. It was creating a lot of tension in the marriage. In addition to playing, Amy allowed us to make comments, so guitarist Saul Rubin said, "everyone I know who's in Finance is proud to say 'I'M IN FINANCE!' They say it like they’re saying ‘I make way more money than you!’ But when you said 'I'm in Finance' you were like, all depressed."

Amy has been able to assist in the healing of a lot of people with her jazz consultations. When people were right there in the room with us, listening to music created just for them and their particular situation, things coalesced for them in a way that bypasses words and goes straight to the heart of the matter. The fact that she's been doing the jazz consultations for 26 years straight speaks to the program's success.

The transformative and healing properties of music have been recognized for centuries, even if they've been downplayed in favor of so-called 'modern' medical techniques. As John Beaulieu notes in his book Music and Sound in the Healing Arts, music–particularly religious music–traditionally was strictly off limits to the medical profession. "The penalty for a doctor infringing upon the realm of the church could mean death or imprisonment. This was the fate of Wilhelm Reich as late as 1956. Since music is considered by the church to be an expression of the soul, it is not surprising that to this day doctors pay little attention to its healing properties."

Peggy Holroyde in her book The Music of India states "Music is an acknowledged form of Yoga....emotions are purified as in a crucible of heat." She emphasizes that "the actual vocalization is an act of worship, identifying the singer with God through the song, and through the emission of pure sound from lung and larynx."

The music we choose to listen to changes our internal (as well as external) environment. I believe this correlates with biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton's work. In his book Biology of Belief he says "I realized that a cell's life is fundamentally controlled by the physical and energetic environment with only a small contribution by its genes. Genes are simply molecular blueprints used in the construction of cells, tissues, and organs. The environment serves as a 'contractor' who reads and engages those genetic blueprints and is ultimately responsible for the character of a cell's life. It is a single cell's 'awareness' of the environment that primarily sets into motion the mechanisms of life."

The tradition of religious Afro-Cuban Santería music is so strong that it has actually seeped into Latin American popular music. A similar phenomenon happened with the African-American spirituals that were a sub-category of folk songs, and led directly to today's worship music. The spirituals of the 17th-19th centuries were not just for churchgoing. They were embedded in the daily life of slaves, in the form of work songs and field songs. Sea chanties also belong to this category.

Work songs alone are a virtually inexhaustible topic.

Ted Gioia

wrote a whole book on them.

Religious chanting has a long history throughout the world. The intent and meaning of a particular sound, as in language, may come into play here as the primary healing element. When a Hindu chants the sound “Om”, or when Jews chant the Torah, the meaning of the sounds to the chanter is what empowers the chant. Philosopher Henri Tracol stated, “We cannot hope to grasp from a translation what the Koran means to the true Muslim believer, because the meaning passes through the vibrations of the sound when it is chanted in Arabic.”

Some may argue that chanting, which sometimes consists of only two notes, is not music. But since many of today's Grammy-winning melodies also consist of only two notes, I think we can throw that argument out. The really interesting thing is that chanting seems to be effective whether audible or silent. As noted in Part II, the very act of mentally imagining the sounds creates a reality, whether audible or not. The principle is the same whether it's a simple chant or a symphony; a composer must hear the music in their head before they can notate it on paper.

Chanting traditions are often imbued in a set of traditions or belief systems. For example, Indigenous Australians chant about how mythical creatures formed the land; Hindus chant to worship deities, and Muslims chant as a way of surrendering to God and showing their devotion. Strong belief systems are not merely comforting; they can enhance people’s ability to recover and heal from trauma or physical injury. The prevalence of strong belief systems in most chanting practices implies that such beliefs may play an important role in altered states of consciousness, implicating the possible involvement of brain regions and changes associated with religion and spirituality. SOURCE: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7828722/.

It's no accident that much of our healing music is vocalized.

"All the moving forms...may be found again in the possibilities of movement of the human larynx. This means that all the movements which Nature uses in the creation of her creatures and also all those movements which, once created, the creatures may use, may be found in the human larynx–as though in a great gathering of creative beings. The larynx has innumerable possibilities of movement, and with every one of them it can delicately influence the stream of breath and impress moving forms upon the flow of air, which then become audible for us as sounds, tones, speech." --Theodor Schwenk (Sensitive Chaos. Schocken Books, 1976, p. 126.

Lisa Sokolov has been a professor at NYU for decades, and founded a vocal training system called Embodied VoiceWork. She comments in an interview "We're using a lot of our life force to keep ourselves properly managed...your inner creativity, your own music that you're hearing inside starts to get obscured by the constant barrage of popular culture." She teaches that rather than being victims of the onslaught of audio impressions, we can cultivate our own singing voice to reconnect with our authentic self, the self that keeps getting hijacked by the "constant barrage of popular culture."

As the ancient alchemists did with substances like mercury and sulfur, the intent of the medieval troubadours was to use music as a process of transformation in both performer and listener. In his book Pathways to Philosophy, Manly Palmer Hall quotes one of the legendary troubadours, Hugo de Brunet: "I pretend that my song is for a mortal woman, but it is nothing of the kind."

Some find their healing music through their faith, even–no, especially–if one is a Pagan. Aldous Huxley said "My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.” Nature has its own music of course. Can we say it is 'music' though? Wordnik gives the following definition: "The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre."

Amongst all the definitions of what music is, I don't see any requirement that it has to be made by humans. And not for nothin', as far as I know humans are still part of Nature, the Transhumanist Movement notwithstanding. Bernie Kraus may have gotten the press on it, but thousands of other composers throughout history have found their inspiration in the sounds of Nature.

From the exorcism rituals of primitive societies to the mantras chanted by religious devotees, sound plays an important role in mediating or accessing the realms of the Divine, the higher self, and the unconscious mind. It is also effective in healing the physical body, although we're not always sure why. Perhaps the answer won't be known for some time to come. For the most part, scientists will never be mystics, and will never know the circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. They are, of necessity, too involved in determining the details of the center and the circumference. Conversely, as Lisa Summer points out in her book Music — The New Age Elixir, “When music healers resort to science it is often worse than when they do not. The science of sound is not their forte. Few music healers are competent in this field, yet few abstain from reckless hypothesizing in it.” 

Mystics believe that the body belongs to the world, but the spirit belongs to an unseen realm. As humans, we belong to both worlds–seen and unseen. And so we must look for the truth that belongs to the body as well as the truth that belongs to the spirit. Just as one cannot travel between Colorado and Nevada by ship or get to North Captiva Island by car, we need an appropriate vehicle to transport us between the realms of the physical and the spiritual. 

We have learned that sound can be a vehicle for healing of both body and soul. We can also ask, is sound/music the vehicle that will allow us to travel between the world of the body and the world of the soul, healing both along the way? Also remembering there's no right or wrong here: if the music feels healing to you, then it is healing for you.

Go forth and listen to music.

“In the course of time music will become more and more potent to bring humanity into touch with the higher planes, thus enabling them to experience a spiritual joy and exaltation which now can only be experienced by the very few.” —British composer Cyril Scott (Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages. 3rd ed. The Aquarian Press, 1982, p. 201.)

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Update:

Valerie, the publisher of the Ringing Cedars Series I wrote about last month, has given me permission to release her contact information so you can reach her directly to arrange for a shipment of the series, which has been out of print. I believe she will also take orders for individual books in the series.

Valerie tel.: 800-514-5011
e mail: office@ringingcedars.com

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Spirals in Music and Life

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