Music Therapy

'Music Is A Basic Need Of Human Survival'

I have come to understand that music is not part of 'arts and entertainment' as the newspaper section would have us believe! It is not a luxury, a lavish thing we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.
Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart wrenching beautiful piece, 'Adagio for Strings'. If not, then you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you even had.
Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what is really going on inside us the way a good therapist does. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of people are going to cry a couple of moments after the music starts. I will give you one example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I enjoyed playing in Paris, it made me very happy to please the critics of major newspapers and foreign heads of states.
The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a samll town a few years ago. I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a cellist. Midway through a piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70's. It was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demenor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by a particular movement of that particular piece of Copland's, but it wasn't the first time I have heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.
The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of thier lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why MUSIC MATTERS!
'Framkly, I expect everyone to master music. I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought as much war as they have peace! If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the Nazi camps and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.
As long as artists continue to bring music to a troubled world there will always be a continuing reason to hope for better things to come.

(Reference; Dr. Paulnack, Boston School of Music)

Author: Raymond Vacchino M.Mus. (MT) A.Mus. Licentiate, Classical Music Critic.