My colleague Dwight Garner is a great connoisseur of quotes. This week I found myself stumbling in a dark corner of misquoting. While music may indeed have the charm of “appeasing the savage beast,” as is often said, the line actually ends with “savage bosom,” which is the same as William Shakespeare’s work. It is thought to have been written by William Congreve in his 1697 play In Memoriam. bride. “
You get it now.
The calming and stimulating effects of music, its use as a kind of medicine, is the subject of at least three books published this year. This is not a new treatment, but it is a hot spot of research.
I’ve been there for a while, curious to understand why my mother, a retired professional violist and pianist with advanced dementia, retains so much memory in this particular area (including her eyesight). I’ve been wandering around. She still performs string quartets and piano duos every week, singing in perfect harmony to Alexa’s rather mediocre choices, but the old game of naming composers is gone.
“The Schubert Treatment: A Story of Music and Healing” (Greystone, $24.95) by cellist and art therapist Claire Oppelt uses her “eternal instrument” to serve a series of patients suffering from various conditions. This is a slim yet brilliant record of how he performs using the . The inevitable final episode.
Oppelt’s father was an industrial physician who was beloved by several theaters in Paris and also played the piano. Oppelt has worked with Howard Buten, a professional clown, novelist, and psychologist specializing in autism. (There are many polymaths in this field.) Although she is intertwined with charts, data, and analysis, her philosophy is comprehensive. “Trust and gratitude come before the beauty of all things. This is the basis of life and its foundation.”
More bluntly, “10 minutes of Schubert is equivalent to 5 milligrams of oxygen,” the head of a palliative care unit at a Parisian hospital told her. (Perhaps this is why Donald J. Trump played “Ave Maria” at a recent rally-turned-Swayfest venue.)
Of course, Schubert may not be the correct formula, and experimentation is required to find the right dosage. Why does one Bach suite soothe a severely autistic teenager, while another inspires him to drill holes in his cello? How amazing it is to keep the rhythm of “Children of Love.” As Oppelt watched and listened to Edith Piaf, the 65-year-old former boxer with ALS removed his oxygen mask and sang along, proclaiming: I’m strong enough to fight! ”
“Schubert’s Treatment” was translated from French by Katia Grubisic, with only occasional clichés such as the author’s heart being “so full that it would burst.” Oppelt records the deep reactions of her case studies, the emotional codas that vibrate from the page.
“My scream of fear of death was released into the sea of sound friends!”
“My anger smells like leftover soup.”
“How strange to know that I am the same person who was lying in the cradle just a few years ago.”
I had a little more trouble reading prolific cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin’s latest book, I HEARD THERE WAS A SECRET CHORD: Music as Medicine (Norton, $32.50). did. The title is a reference to a line from Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah.”
Strangely enough, it was because I heard it wrong. The audiobook version is not without its problems. It is narrated by the author, with a charming voice even at 1.5x speed, and well-chosen musical interludes. The same goes for audiobooks in general, which have been a huge boon for the publishing industry.
But for many of us who learned to read by being thrown into a pile of books and left alone, a voice that inflects so many words can be distracting, irritating, or distracting to the so-called “recipient.” may cause ‘anxiety’. It can calm the savage chest and make you fall asleep unconsciously.
Levitin, the best-selling author of “This Is Your Brain on Music,” will never be offended by haters on his audiobooks. The former music producer, who has been compared to Carlos Santana, Linda Ronstadt and Sting, is also an avid brain and chromosome cartographer, and the illustrations included in the hardcover edition help him understand complex concepts. Masu. “I Heard There Was a Secret Chord” is as digressive and interesting as a long jazz riff, exploring music’s ability to deal with trauma, aid movement disorders, and alleviate pain. “Like propofol, it turns on the anterior cingulate,” he writes.
Levitin is a strong advocate of taste diversity. He argues that the hierarchies that we police in everyday life do not exist in music therapy. Everyone’s impression is different. For some people, listening to heavy metal is torture, a premature journey to hell. For some, it’s a sweet, clear-headed sense of freedom.
He wrote MUSIC AND MIND: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness (Viking, $35), an uneven but interesting collection of essays edited by soprano Renée Fleming, with contributions from Roseanne Cash and Yo-Yo Ma, among others. He has also contributed.
This book is more of a conference than a book. Perhaps it was because the conference was hosted by the Kennedy Center during a pandemic, but the typically dry prose of the academic intertwines with that of novelist Richard Powers, who intertwines his 1991 “Goldbug Variations.” are being collected. Bach and DNA. And Fleming’s friend Ann Patchett was inspired by Fleming’s voice while writing “Bel Canto.”
Patchett is living proof that people can recover from ignoring a melody. “Birds that are not given other birds will not learn to sing properly,” she writes. “I grew up in a family that never played music on instruments, on the stereo, or even in the car.”
She learned how to listen properly by reading Fred Plotkin’s “Opera 101.” “Take it slow,” she says. “The part of my brain that studied music was overtaken by the part of my heart that felt it.”
In an age of never-ending playlists, where songs are all too available algorithmically, these writers believe that regular appointments to consciously listen, play, and sing can turn clinics into A reminder that it can be more effective than visiting. My mother may have forgotten it for decades, but she remembers complex time signatures. As she casually proclaims, Mr. Congreve, turn over. “Music is my life!”
