My colleague Dwight Garner is a great connoisseur of the quotation. I find myself stumbling around this week in the dark corners of the misquotation. Music may indeed have charms to “soothe the savage beast,” as is oft-declared, but the line actually ends “a savage breast,” and is attributable not to William Shakespeare, but to William Congreve, from his 1697 play “The Mourning Bride.”
Now you know.
Music’s soothing and stimulating effect — its use as a kind of medicine — is the subject of at least three books published this year. This is not a new therapy, but a blooming hot spot of research.
I’ve been poking around there for a while, curious to figure out why my mother, a retired professional violist and pianist with advancing dementia, retains so much of her memory (including the ability to sight-read) in this particular realm. She still plays weekly string quartets and piano duos and sings in perfect harmony with Alexa’s somewhat middlebrow choices, though an old game of name-the-composer has faded.
THE SCHUBERT TREATMENT: A Story of Music and Healing (Greystone, $24.95), by the cellist and art therapist Claire Oppert, is a slim but shimmery account of performing on her “forever instrument” for a series of patients with varied afflictions, including the inevitable final one.
Oppert’s father was a beloved company doctor for several theaters in Paris, who himself played the piano, and she has worked with Howard Buten, a professional clown, novelist and psychologist specializing in autism. (This field teems with polymaths.) Though she tangles dutifully with charts, data and analytics, her philosophy is holistic: “trust and gratitude before the splendor of all things: This is life’s foundation, its bedrock.”
Or, more bluntly: “Ten minutes of Schubert is the equivalent of five milligrams of oxy,” the chief of the palliative care unit at a Paris hospital tells her. (Maybe this is why Donald J. Trump played “Ave Maria” at that recent rally-turned-swayfest.)
Of course Schubert might not be the right prescription, and finding the proper dose takes experimentation. Why is it that one Bach suite calms a teenager with severe autism, while another incites him to punch a hole through her cello? How remarkable that a paralyzed patient’s left toe retains the rhythm to Bizet’s “L’Amour est enfant de bohème”? Listening to Edith Piaf in Oppert’s presence, a 65-year-old man with A.L.S., a former boxer, removes his oxygen mask to sing along and proclaim: “I’m in the ring. I’m strong enough to fight!”
“The Schubert Treatment” is translated from the French by Katia Grubisic with only the occasional cliché, like the author’s heart being “full to bursting.” Oppert records her case studies’ profound reactions, emotional codas that vibrate from her pages.
“My cry of fear at death has been released into a sea of sound-friends!”
“My anger smells like soup left uneaten.”
“How strange it is that I’m the same man who was lying in a cradle just a few years ago.”
I struggled a little more with the prolific cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin’s latest book, I HEARD THERE WAS A SECRET CHORD: Music as Medicine (Norton, $32.50), titled after a line in the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah.”
Strangely enough, this was because I made the mistake of listening to it. Not that there’s anything wrong with the audiobook version, which is narrated by the author, with an appealing voice even at 1.5 speed, and well-chosen musical interludes. Nor with audiobooks in general, which have been such a boon for the publishing industry.
But for the many among us who learned to read by being plunked in a pile of books and left alone, a voice intoning a great many words can distract, or irritate, or provoke what is grandly called “receiver apprehension.” It can soothe the savage breast right into unwitting slumber.
Levitin, the author of the best-selling “This Is Your Brain on Music,” would surely take no offense at any aversion to his audiobook. A former music producer who has compared notes with Carlos Santana, Linda Ronstadt and Sting, he is also an inveterate brain and chromosome mapper, and the illustrations included in the hardcover version help with complicated concepts. “I Heard There Was a Secret Chord” is as digressive and intriguing as a long jazz riff, investigating the ability of music to address trauma, aid with movement disorders and mitigate pain. “Like propofol,” he writes, it “flips the switch of the anterior cingulate.”
Levitin is a fierce advocate for the variability of taste. The hierarchies we police in everyday life have no place in music therapy, he argues; everyone’s imprint is different. For some people hearing heavy metal is torture, a premature trip to hell; for others, a sweet, head-clearing release.
He contributes as well to MUSIC AND MIND: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness (Viking, $35), an uneven but interesting collection of essays edited by the soprano Renée Fleming, with contributions from Rosanne Cash and Yo-Yo Ma, among others.
It’s not so much a book as a conference — maybe because it was a conference, during the pandemic, organized by the Kennedy Center — gathering the generally drier prose of researchers with that of the novelists Richard Powers, whose 1991 “The Goldbug Variations” entwined Bach and DNA; and Ann Patchett, a friend of Fleming’s, whose voice inspired her during the writing of “Bel Canto.”
Patchett is living proof that one can recover from melodic neglect. “Birds deprived of other birds will not learn to sing properly,” she writes. “I had grown up in a family where people had not played music, not on an instrument or on a stereo or in the car.”
She learned how to listen properly by reading “Opera 101,” by Fred Plotkin. “Slowly,” she says, “the part of my brain that was studying music was overtaken by the part of my heart that felt it.”
In the era of the never-ending playlist, when tunes are almost too algorithmically available, these writers remind that a regular appointment of conscious listening, playing or singing can be better than a visit to the clinic. My mother may have forgotten entire decades, but she can remember complex time signatures. As she’ll blithely proclaim — roll over, Congreve — “Music is my life!”
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