Caught in a terrible conundrum of whether I should break my diet over New York Super Fudge Chunk or Chunky Monkey at Ben & Jerry's the other day, I was reading the different fliers pinned to the community bulletin board inside this 200 square feet of ice-cream heaven.
One flier read, "Got the blues? Learn to play them!"
I don't know whether to blame the kids or my depression for my stupidity (the death of my brain cells in the prefrontal cortex), but I had to read these seven words four times (that's 28 words) before I understood the message, which is an important one:
Music can help treat depression.
Back before my Prozac and Zoloft days, music was my sole therapy. I pounded out Rachmaninoff's "Prelude to C Sharp Minor" as a way of processing my parents' hostile divorce. My hour or more a day at the upright piano in the family room of my childhood home became a sanctuary of sorts for me. I practiced scales, cadences and arpeggios until they were perfect, because rhythm -- that sweet pattern between sound and silence -- was something that I could control with the tip of my fingers. Emotion was translated into melody as I played the ivory and ebony keys, sometimes closing my eyes.
During the worst months of my depression, I blared the soundtrack of "The Phantom of the Opera." Pretending to be the phantom with a cape and a mask, I twirled around our living room, swinging David and Katherine in my arms. I belted out every word of "The Music of the Night," which I had learned to play on the piano for my stepdad as his birthday present one year (it is one of his favorites, too).
"Softly, deftly, music shall caress you,
Feel it, hear it, secretly possess you..."
The gorgeous song -- like all good music -- could stroke that tender place within me that words couldn't get to.
Everything with a beat moves my spirit. Even Yanni, with his long hair blowing in the wind (I saw a video once... and the image unfortunately stuck). But especially the classics. I can't get enough of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, because I think so much better when these guys are playing in the background. (Consequently almost everything I publish has been written under their influence.)
And apparently I'm not alone. The website of the American Music Therapy Association lists 57 pages of research articles chronicling the successful use of music to help treat a host of different illnesses, including depression, anxiety, substance abuse and chronic pain.
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Michael Graziano: Why is Music a Religious Experience?
I've read your articles on and off over the years and your willingness to expose your thoughts and feelings is commendable. You are a brave and courageous soul.
There a hardcore biologists who call music a Spandrel -- "a byproduct of the evolution of some other character, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection."
To me, this is a dismissive term, as if you can take consciousness, feelings and creativity, and boil it down into a sterile equation -- something as dry and as dead as an ancient bone lying bleached in a desert.
No, the human mind is more than just the sum of its neurons, or at least I think so. Music is a deep and important element of the human psyche.
I recently saw Werner Herzog's movie, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams." In a cave filled with cave paintings 30,000 years old, was found a flute made of bone. It was tuned to the same musical scale that we have today.
Music is one of the things that makes us human. It is not an accident of biology, it is us.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43187290/ns/health-health_care/
I'd like to quit, but I don't want "doing myself in" to be the method.
Same goes for songs in languages I understand. I wind up singing along. (This can get embarrassing while shopping.)
For background, I need ambient-type music, or simple strings, or Indian or Chinese or Japanese. But I still need music, the entire range of it. I just need different types at different times.
I can pick up a guitar and make two hours seem like five minutes and feel refreshed.
You can also express emotion with an instrument. I have known this for years.
There is something about human cells and musical vibrations............
- Shaun Morgan of the band Seether
Do You Have Trouble Exercising? http://blog.yospug.com/2011/05/how-hard-is-it-to-exercise/
http://themusicneverstopped-movie.com/