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Feb
15
I was invited to a lecture at the Royal Society of Medicine entitled ‘Music and Medicine’. Half of the lecture was of particular interest: a seminar by Paul Robertson, ex-leader of the Medici Quartet, on the subject of how music can be practically applied in a clinical setting, how musical expression can remain intact even when verbal communication is lost, and the wider social and cultural implications of how neurological and physiological empathy can be extended through music.
Working from the basis that music is a map of the human condition and of individuality, he produced a set of observations that really show the quite clear way in which music, or the experience of music, can be for us a metaphor for human life.
Music is, he argues, a conduit to all other types of communication; a basic, innate means of expression that can create interaction between human beings in ways which nothing else can.
Taking this to its logical conclusion, you might hope that this would enable communication where other means are for some reason broken or unavailable (I know from first hand experience that this is true, but my evidence is empirical rather than scientific). Happily, Robertson produced plenty of hard evidence to this effect; most potently, the process by which an autistic boy had been taught to use music to allay the frustration and pain of being unable to communicate in other ways. A touching video showed mother with son at the age of 18; a vast, near-normal range of communication techniques - verbal as well as musical - was finally at his disposal.
Perhaps even more striking was an audio tape of interactions between a young child, who screamed and shouted violently with almost no repose, and the piano-playing of late music therapist and composer Paul Nordorf. The first few sessions were unsurprisingly anarchic and distressing, but as the tape progressed, the reaction of the child to the music became clear, and by session 9 a distinct and complex vocal/pianistic interaction was taking place. As the child found a way to communicate, true music making began to evolve. Robertson pointed out, believably, that the end result was very similar in structure and complexity to a Beethoven Scherzo!
What struck me most about these various comments was how much Robertson’s work taps into an emerging undercurrent of musical thought that relates more and more to a universal order. We traced the beginning of speech back to conception and the womb, and noted how new-born children of every culture begin to speak with the same sounds, before linguistic patterns and social variations begin to kick in (Leonard Bernstein makes the same observations in his 1973 Harvard Lectures, The Unanswered Question). Truly, there’s a universal music.
That’s the thing; because of our basic universal foundation (i.e we’re all human beings!), we’d appreciate other cultures just as much as our own… if we’d been raised within them. So the potential for creating that understanding is always there (it’s just a matter of having enough time to do it!). Therefore, if we’re able to find a way of interacting cross culturally in a productive way - finding a common vocabulary if you like - there’s a lot of worthwhile stuff to learn.
Similarly, if the Arts and the Sciences (and the general public and many other disciplines) had a shared vocabulary, then discoveries and ideas would flow everywhere much more easily. More than ever, there’s a massive amount of discovery going on in every field, and the relation between ideas in different disciplines, cultures etc. is often far more intimate than it might first appear.
One of the benefits of interaction between all these different fields is that it restructures the link between classical excellence and other excellence. There’s no doubt that for classical music to exist to its full potential excellence is needed, in a way that’s simply not necessary in the performance of a pop song. Brain surgery needs to achieve excellence in a way that a basic diagnosis of the common cold by a GP simply doesn’t. F1 driver versus bus driver. Olympic athlete verses Sunday jogger. I’m sure you can think of a million and one better examples.
When someone achieves excellence in one field (or even just comes to an understanding of what it takes to achieve excellence), it opens their awareness up to the possibility of excellence as a whole. People can take this and run with it. That’s why you’ll find a lot of high-achieving professional people have learnt musical instruments as children, and are really quite good at it. That’s also a reason why musical education is so important.
But I’m straying…. back for a moment to music and medicine for one final thought:
Social pathologies that can be addressed with music, can often be solved on an individual level in the same way. If you look at the history of pretty much any culture, we can see how music has shaped society, from primitive rituals through religious ceremonies through to the ’soundtrack’-soaked world of today. A greater understanding of the brain, we can argue, will show us more and more how these great swathes of social music making are represented microcosmically (if that’s a word) at the level of an individual human being. Proof is on it’s way too, if you remember this article.
Heavy, eh? OK, I’ll go and prepare some pithy blog postings with some jokes about viola players’ brains or something. (they’re very expensive you know - on a cell per matter basis, you need a considerable amount of viola player brain to harvest a usable amount of cells) 
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