Music therapy can be passive (listening) or active (playing). It has been shown, for example, to reduce depression scores in bone marrow transplant recipients and reduce length of hospital stay The expression of self and experience through the medium of music, allows for physical release and both unconscious and conscious story-telling, to relive or defervesce the experience of healing others. Thus the healer may heal themselves. In this brief session, I will try to show examples from my own experience as a songwriter.
Songs about health and ill-health and mortality are legion, from 1950s bluesman Earl Hooker’s There’s a Fungus among Us (he died of tuberculosis), to Sister Morphine by the Rolling Stones (mistakenly banned from radio play as “drug” song) to Chris Rea’s stunning Someday My Peace Will Come from his Album Dancing Down The Stony Road, written mostly about his experience with pancreatic cancer.
Good music is entirely subjective, but involves the creation of musical tension and release. The songwriter must make choices: Major key (happy) or minor (sad)? Standard 4/4 time or ¾ (waltz, which creates a different feel and rhythm)? First person or third person voice? Slow or fast? Do you use a bridhe to expand or change the central idea? Protest songs (song: Brave new World) and love songs (song: Symphony Song) are an essential part of the singer-songwriter’s musical vocabulary. A song might give form to the experience of being a health pioneer (song: Trouble and Strife). Or a song can sometimes recapitulate the healer’s journey with a patient (song: I Saw the Light Go Out In Your Eyes).
Finally, I make no claim to being a great song-writer (I have won a WA Music Industry Award for my composition Guilty As Charged, so that gives me some credibility!), or having a great voice. That’s not the point here! I see music as a uniquely human medium, as a great unseen radio station, accessible to all of us at any time to greater and lesser degrees. Music can melt barriers between people and within ourselves and as such play a key role in healing.