Music has a mysterious power. It may serve as background to a gathering or task or drive and then suddenly leap to the fore, seize us and surge through us, changing how we experience ourselves and perceive the world. The impact music has on us is not easy to characterize or quantify, but Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness, edited by the renowned opera singer Renée Fleming and published this year, makes the attempt from multiple perspectives. Fleming has long served as an advocate for research at the intersection of medicine, therapy, and the arts, and initiated the first collaboration between the National Institutes of Health and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Music and Mind contains essays by medical researchers on the impact of music on heart health, brain plasticity, pain management, and disorders associated with aging. Articles by music therapists are full of anecdotes about the healing power of music in the lives of those struggling with mental health issues. But for the music lover, the most enjoyably browsable essays are those by musicians, writers and artists.
The National Book Award-winning novelist Richard Powers offers an evocative description of playing the beloved Scottish-Irish ballad “The Parting Glass” in his home in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. He notes how music, “simply by unfolding chords in a certain order and weaving them through with a tuneful filigree,” can fill us with sorrow, a kind of “harmonious grief,” and that while we are often told that the secret to health is moving, there is “also great health in being moved.” Rhiannon Giddens, Pulitzer Prize-winning musician and Artistic Director of the Silk Road Ensemble, writes about the primal power of music to bring people together and process their experiences during difficult times, as well as its role in telling peoples’ stories in oral folk music traditions.
Roseanne Cash shares her experience of impaired hearing and debilitating pain from a rare brain condition, along with the slow musical rehabilitation that followed surgery, and her struggles with the shame and self-loathing that were triggered by her incapacities. After “years of fried nerves, searing pain, and hopelessness” post-surgery, her left ear “calmed down and opened up like a blossom,” and that girl of her childhood who was afflicted with shame “went through hell, she came back, and she sings to the farthest rafter, with a big life full of love and laughter.”
The novelist Ann Patchett has an essay on falling in love with opera, and choreographer Mark Morris introduces an article by David Leventhal on dance and Parkinson’s disease. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma writes about the power of music to return us to the deeper and more reciprocal relationship to the natural world practiced by the Indigenous communities he has been visiting and learning from over the last five years.
Music is notoriously elusive and difficult to write about. In this collection, some of its power is captured through its effects in our lives—what it does to our brains, our bodies, our psyches, our communities, and our histories. Excellent as a companion volume to the also recently published I Heard There Was A Secret Chord: Music As Medicine by neurologist and musician Daniel J. Levitin, Music and Mind ranges more widely across the musical experience, and is a music lover’s delight.
Jared is an adult services librarian at the Howe Library in Hanover. He purchases a range of nonfiction for the library and conspires with a colleague to devise the library’s programming. When otherwise free, he’s usually in the mountains, swimming in local ponds and rivers, trying his hand at new cuisines, reading, or dreaming of walking the Scottish Highlands.