The Power of Music and the Arts
An extract from The Evening Standard. Article by Norman Lebrecht:
There is nothing so liberating as opening your chest cavity and giving vent to a song. Never mind if you?re flat or sharp, in tune or out, the physical release is one the great forms of catharsis, the way we become whole with ourselves. I walked alone on an empty Basque beach for hours in early summer, belting out old favourites whose lyrics had gone a bit blurry in the mind but whose healing force was undimmed.
If you have never sung a scratch Messiah or Elijah at the Royal Albert Hall, join the next Easter blast. Fill the dome with your voice: it will feel better than any physical workout. Singing is the oldest human need after food and the sexual urge, the need to give voice to wonderment and joy. It is the beginnings of spiritual awareness, the engine of social harmony, the flowering of love.
So sing out one and all this Christmas Eve. Sing a carol while you're waiting for a bus, Silent Night in the Heathrow departure lounge, Come all Ye Faithful on the clogged M25. Sing because it will annoy the killjoys and Scrooges, the pc-enforcers, the congestion chargers, the flight cancellers. Sing because it feels so good. Sing for happiness, sing for hope, sing for a better year ahead, for peace on earth and joy to all mankind.
An extract from: Clift S M and Hancox G (2006) Music and Wellbeing. In Integrating Spirituality in Health and Social Care, W. Greenstreet (ed.) Radcliffe Publishing.
Music has deep roots in the evolution of the human psyche; it serves together with language to distinguish us from all other species; we are born with an innate capacity to respond to music, and throughout life for most people music has a special place. Music has a profound capacity to connect with and express our emotions, and can open up a world of experience and beauty, which goes beyond the mundane and the banal realities of everyday life. It therefore provides a wonderful resource in promoting health in a holistic sense embracing not just the well balanced functioning of the body, but our social and mental wellbeing, and the life of the spirit – our purposes, aspirations and hopes for a fuller life.
Folkestone GP Dr Sarah Montgomery is a member of the Centre’s Advisory Group. Here she gives a personal account of how her interest in the role of music in health care began:
My interest in the beneficial impact of music on health began when I was a newly qualified junior doctor. At the time, part of my work involved caring for patients with advanced dementia in a long stay hospital where disoriented elderly people roamed the wards apparently unable to engage in any kind of normal social interaction. One day I watched the hospital chaplain lead a short service of Holy Communion. In place of the liturgy he used hymns. I was amazed by the transformation in the atmosphere of the ward the behaviour of my patients. People who could no longer recognise their own spouses sang the hymns they had known since childhood and calmly took communion. Their dignity and humanity was restored. Music achieved in an instant what drugs and dedicated nursing care could never do.
Susan Digby (BBC Music Magazine, September 1999), Director of the Voices Foundation, highlights the role of music in South African townships:
Spend any Sunday in a South African township and you will understand that a culture in which singing is upheld as a necessary function to keep body, soul and faith intact, is a healthier one; people from all generations, from grand parents to grand children, sing together, all uniting to express their faith. It’s the communal singing that unites them in a very powerful very uplifting way. Singing is not a miracle cure for the World’s ills, but it’s one kind of medication that can have remarkable results
An extract from: Jeanette Winterson (2003) ‘Opera – it’s better than sex’ The Guardian, 23 June
A life of work, shopping and telly is not a life; it is a poor existence. What’s more, such a life unbalances us to the point of psychosis. To be psychotic means to be out of touch with reality. Reality, however, you define it, has to be the whole picture, not only the surface. Our lives run entirely on the surface, and the breakdowns and neurosis that are so common are symptoms of our private despair.