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”.
