CURES BY MUSIC

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 September 1938, Page 7

CURES BY MUSIC

AMAZING RESULTS CLAIMED. A HEALING ORCHESTRA. Wide is the range of effects that music can have on human emotions. When Benny Goodman “goes to town” at a swing festival, thousands of swing addicts do impromptu, crazy dances in the aisles of the theatre or hall where he is playing. Yet so depressing was the effect of melancholy “Gloomy Sunday” that more than a dozen Czechs committed suicide after hearing the record played. First to realise that music can be used to lessen suffering has been the American State Aid Charities Association. Impressed by what music therapy had done for world war wounded they founded as long ago as 1923 the Revellers, an orchestra composed of blind men and cripples. By last year the Revellers were cheering patients in 43 hospitals and homes with 1100 wards. Recently the Association, together with the Federal Music Project, have tried their theories on thousands of prison, reformatory, and hospital inmates, have proved that music can be used as a narcotic, tonic, sedative, or stimulant, can aid recoveries from disorders ranging from insanity to paralysis. Says Harriet Seymour of the State Charities Aid: “Sound pours out in waves. These waves wind themselves round the nerves and the nerves carry the vibrations to the spine and to the bony structure; in short, the sound sectors of the body. The body then is a sound-box, and the sound is received into the whole system, releases tension, soothing or stimulating as the case may be.” The Federal Music Project’s experiments have disclosed that a patient under a local anaesthetic appreciates sentimental melodies, while a tuberculosis case reacts best to pastoral music. Better for insomniacs than counting sheep are a few bars of Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song.” For cases of depression doctors order rhythm numbers with as much percussion as possible, but for cardiacs swing is barred, and soothing, sweet music is the prescription. One of the most astounding examples of the efficacy of musical therapy was that of a woman lying out of her mind with a fractured skull in a Coney Island hospital. When the musicians arrived on their usual round the patient had been out of her mind for two weeks, and the nurse in charge of the ward was doubtful whether to let them play. She decided to take a chance, and told : the orchestra to play softly at the far end of the room.

A few minutes after they had struck the first chord the woman called the nurse, told her how much she was enjoying it. It was the patient’s first rational moment since her skull had been fractured.

Though modern science had only just tumbled to the power that sound holds for both good and evil, music therapy is at least 500 years old. In the Middle Ages there was a disease called “tarantism,” supposed to be caused by tarantula bite. The cure for this was a piece of swifttempoed music that was played on and on for hours, sometimes days, so that the victims could dance the poison out of their systems.