That great music can up be uplifting, transportive, transcendent – and conversely sorrowful or deeply unsettling – is a given, but its power to heal in the medicinal sense strikes me as a much more difficult proposition to prove. In Music As Medicine, Daniel Levitin makes a valiant attempt to do just that, citing in his introductory chapter heavyweights such as Confucius – “Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without” – and Plato – “More than anything else, rhythm and harmony find their way into the inmost soul and take hold upon it”.
While both these statements attest to the deep pleasure to be derived from music – its soothing rather than healing properties – perhaps the most pertinent quote comes from the late Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author of bestselling books such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and The Island of the Colourblind. Sacks was an enthusiastic piano player who, according to Levitin tackled Bach fugues “with great joy and exuberance”. He once described his clinical approach as essentially a musical one – “I diagnose by the feeling of discordancy or some peculiarity of harmony.” As Michael Rossato-Bennett’s 2014 documentary Alive Inside shows, the impact of music on people can sometimes be spectacular: one 92-year-old man, Henry Dryer, whose days in a nursing home were passed in a near catatonic state, suddenly became excited when played music from his youth – as Levitin puts it, “singing joyfully and reminiscing”.
Sacks’s writing, scholarly and informative, is the most obvious touchstone for Levitin’s popularising style. A neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist who trained at Stanford, he is now a professor of behavioural neuroscience and music at McGill University in Montreal. He temporarily forsook science for music in the 1970s, playing in various bands before becoming a music consultant and sound engineer for, among others, Santana, Steely Dan and Stevie Wonder. This unique dual perspective underpins his bestselling volume of 2006 – This Is Your Brain on Music, in which he explored the often complex ways we mentally process and emotionally respond to music, how and why we find some songs profoundly affecting, while others leave us cold.
Like that book, Music As Medicine merges research, theory and intriguing anecdotes about his interactions with musicians as well as patients to provide evidence of his contention that music not only functions as a temporary uplift or soothing balm in times of trouble, but possesses a much deeper restorative quality. In chapters that deal with trauma, mental health and pain, he delves into the ways music-based therapy can be a beneficial part of the recovery process. Collaborative songwriting workshops, for instance, have helped military veterans process their PTSD symptoms by, as Levitin writes, “gently and repeatedly exposing veterans to an artistic reinterpretation of their trauma”. Interestingly, listening to music is a more tricky undertaking in some trauma therapy – on one hand allowing patients to access deep emotions in a less overpowering way, while actually triggering PTSD in others.
Elsewhere, Levitin looks at how musicianship, like any kind of creativity, can be cruelly impaired by illnesses such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, but also how cognitive functioning can sometimes improve when artists re-engage with music in a different way after life-altering diagnoses. For a chapter that focuses on Parkinson’s disease, which affects the central nervous system, progressively impairing movement and cognitive ability, Levitin writes about two musicians whose lives have been altered by the illness. The American singer Linda Ronstadt, who was diagnosed in 2013, stopped performing when her symptoms made it increasingly difficult for her to sing. “What you can’t do with Parkinsonism is repetitive motions and singing is a repetitive motion,” she told Levitin. In contrast, Bobby McFerrin, a jazz singer renowned for his often astonishing improvisational skill, was diagnosed in 2016, but continues to perform, buoyed up by a health regime that includes pilates, physical therapy, breath work and the very act of singing itself. “I still have a mind that likes to play,” he tells Levitin, and it may well be this playful, fluid and spontaneous element of his gift that has enabled him, as Levitin writes, “to channel his musical energy as a force for symptomatic release”.
For me, Music As Medicine works best when Levitin grounds his ideas and explanations in these kinds of personal, and often deeply affecting, encounters. Elsewhere, as is often the case with popular science writing that valiantly tries to demystify difficult subject matter, I found myself struggling with the complexities of cognition, not to mention musical theory. The penultimate chapter, subtitled Précis to a Theory of Musical Meaning, is a blessedly rare case in point.
That apart, Music As Medicine will certainly make you think more deeply about the healing properties of music, particularly for those who perform. As Levitin says, “when we play an instrument (including singing), we are engaging more mental facilities that almost any other activity: motor systems, motor planning, imagining, sensory auditory processing, and – if we’re inspired – creativity, spirituality, pro-social feelings and, possibly, a state of heightened awareness coupled with calm known as the flow state.”
For all that, the spell cast by a great piece of music remains, for me, essentially elusive, somehow floating free from even the most penetrating attempts to demystify it. Indeed, as this fascinating book attests, the more you find out about our cognitive and emotional relationship with music, the more mysterious it seems – and sounds.
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