Music: Magical Healer of Divine Origin?

Oliver Sacks' book of essays Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain is exhibit one in the case for music as the magical healer of the human mind, body, and soul.

Dr. Sacks is a practicing neurologist who has written a number of books about how the brain works — and how it sometimes fails to work — in making us who and what we are. A lifelong music lover and devoted amateur pianist, Sacks is fascinated by how victims of stroke, Alzheimer's, Parkinsonism, Tourette's syndrome, and epilepsy find that listening to music, or actively playing or singing it, can quell or eliminate symptoms.

True, many professional musicians find the long hours of practicing, over many years, can damage them neurologically. The classical pianist Leon Fleisher was crushed as a young man approaching the height of an acclaimed career to note that the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand were starting to curl uncontrollably when he played. This was in 1963; at 36, he could no longer play or practice his instrument. When he tried to force himself to uncurl his fingers at the piano keyboard, his condition only worsened, and nothing the doctors offered helped. He had to stop performing entirely.

After overcoming a deep depression, he started to teach other pianists, and to conduct. Some years later he happened across a rich repertory of classical music for one-handed pianists and made it his own. Years rolled by. Finally, it was discovered that botox injections might alleviate a musician's dystonia — we now know that musician's dystonia can happen when the parts of the brain that are supposed to keep track of (say) what the individual fingers are sensing stop accomplishing that feat properly — but Fleisher found he, personally, had to combine botox with rolfing therapy in order that the small muscles of his hand and forearm could be loosened up enough to allow the botox to work.

In 1996, a semi-restored Fleisher was able to give his first two-handed performance in three decades, and by 2003 he was giving a solo recital at Carnegie Hall. The following year he issued his first major recording in forty years, Two Hands (cover at right).

The real story here is not the magic of botox. It is the way in which Fleisher had, during his years of not being able to play with both hands, come to realize "the most important thing in my life was not playing with two hands, it was music ... The instrumentation [became] unimportant, and ... the substance and content [took] over."

The substance and content of music can be a near-panacea for those devastated by brain-based disorders, Sacks reports. For instance, people who can't normally control the tics, jerks, and involuntary vocalizations of Tourette's syndrome can be helped simply by playing music together:

The attractions, the joys, and the therapeutic powers of drumming and drum circles are widely known in the Tourette's community. In New York City recently, I [Sacks] took part in a drum circle organized by Matt Giordano, a gifted drummer with severe Tourette's. When he is not focused or engaged, Matt is in constant Tourette motion — and, indeed, everyone in the room that day seemed to be ticcing, ticcing in their own time. I could see eruptions of tics, contagions of tics, rippling around the thirty-odd Touretters there — but once the drum circle started, with Matt leading them, all the ticcing disappeared within seconds. Suddenly there was synchronization, and they came together as a group ... . Music here had a double power: first, to reconfigure brain activity, and bring calm and focus to people who were sometimes distracted or preoccupied by incessant tics and impulses; and second, to promote a musical and social bonding with others, so that what began as a miscellany of isolated, often distressed or self-conscious individuals almost instantly became a cohesive group with a single aim — a veritable drum orchestra under Matt's baton.

There are also "musical savants": people of otherwise low intelligence, stemming from abnormal brain development or function, who nevertheless might resemble a particular mentally and physically impaired adult man Sacks discusses, Martin. As Sacks describes him, Martin had a "phonographic memory" for music. This — yes, gifted — man:

... knew more than two thousand operas, as well as the Messiah, the Christmas Oratorio, and all of Bach's cantatas. I brought along scores of some of these, and tested him as best I could; I found I was unable to fault him. And it was not just the melodies that he remembered. He had learned, from listening to performances, what every instrument played, what every voice sang. When I played him a piece by Debussy that he had never heard, he was able to repeat it, almost flawlessly, on the piano. He then transposed it into different keys and extemporized on it a little, in a Debussyan way. He could grasp the rules and conventions of any music he heard, even if it was unfamiliar or not to his taste. This was musicianship of the highest order, in a man who was otherwise so mentally impoverished.

Many stroke victims, too, retain exquisite sensitivity to music. Sacks says many stroke patients he has seen have lost the ability to speak, but when exposed to familiar hymns, they can sing along with the best of them. And many whom strokes have robbed of the ability to initiate ordinary movements such as walking can walk quite normally in time to music!

Music is like a second soul to some. For example, a certain percentage of adults have "absolute pitch," the ability to tell accurately the pitch of any note played at random on the piano keyboard. For these individuals, every key — "key" in music has to do with which note is the anchor of the scale in which the music is played — is as distinct as, say, a palette of blues is from a palette of reds. For people who lack absolute or "perfect" pitch, transposing a song from, let's say, the key of B to that of F-sharp leaves the basic shape of the music unchanged, but to those with perfect pitch, key transposition can seem wrong, wrong, wrong!

On the other hand, music has especially deep resonances for those blessed with perfect pitch. Each piece, rendered in its own proper key, conveys a sort of "meaning" to those with absolute pitch that is lost on the rest of us. Sacks says there is evidence that we all may be born with perfect pitch, but most of us lose it as we learn to speak our first childhood language. However, people whose native language uses tones to convey meaning — Chinese, say — tend more often to keep perfect pitch beyond early childhood. Hence, possibly the right sort of musical or tonal training in infancy, whether or not it comes from learning our first language, might save the majority of us from losing our inborn perfect pitch.

When a person is in deep depression, often he or she can feel no resonances whatever. Inwardly, the person is dead. Some, as did British philosopher John Stuart Mill, can stave off chronic depression by exposure to music in general, says Sacks.

The problem is a tougher one for music to solve, for those already in depression. For many of them, it may only be one particular piece of music that will pierce their depressive "cocoon." And it may have to come to their ears by sheer accident, rather than by design or intent. Sacks tells the story that his own mother's death put him in a zombie state for weeks following the traditional Jewish period of sitting shivah for her — "sitting shivah" is a ritual in which family and loved ones for seven days formally mourn the loss of a beloved:

For weeks I would get up, dress, drive to work, see my patients, try to present a normal appearance. But inside I was dead, as lifeless as a zombie. Then one day as I was walking down Bronx Park East, I felt a sudden lightening, a quickening of mood, a sudden whisper or intimation of life, of joy. Only then did I realize that I was hearing music, though so faintly that it might have been no more than an image or a memory. As I continued to walk, the music grew louder, until finally I came to its source, a radio pouring schubert out of an open basement window. The music pierced me, releasing a cascade of images and feelings — memories of childhood, of summer holidays together, and of my mother's fondness for Schubert ... . I found myself not only smiling for the first time in weeks, but laughing aloud — and alive once again.

Sacks was in a rush to catch a train, so he kept walking ... right back into an obdurate depression. Intentional re-exposure to Schubert failed to lift it. So did attending a performance by his favorite baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau:

I was demanding that the music work [Sacks writes], where experience had shown me that demanding never succeeds. The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic, must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace — as it did when the music stole from the basement window, or when [on an earlier occasion] I was prized open, helplessly, by the brokenhearted eloquence of Zelenka's Lamentations. ("The Arts are not drugs," E.M. Forster once wrote. "They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act.")

Sacks tells his readers that he pretty much lacks religious belief. But here, in the guise of music, would seem to me to be a God who answers prayers as long as they are not couched as demands. Does not the magic of music, then, come to us from the mind of God?