Most of us are familiar with the relaxation and emotional refreshment that playing or listening to music can bring. But it is something else again to employ music to achieve specific health-promoting goals.
If you think about it, you’ll probably recall times at which listening to music helped you untangle some particularly troublesome psychological knots, or maybe helped you get off to sleep faster. When  my-daughter was an infant and indulged in one of her favorite hobbies, crying, she was invariably and quickly soothed when I would lay her down on a bed and play a majestic Beethoven symphony on the phonograph. When my son took to squalling, he was always soothed and made happy again by being walked back and forth while loud rock music blared from the radio.

But in looking through medical literature, it is surprising to find so many examples of real improvement in some rather serious clinical situations that can be achieved with music therapy. Although medical acceptance of this kind of therapy has increased dramatically over the last decade or so, there’s nothing especially new about healing with music.

In the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras regarded music and diet as the two chief means of cleansing the soul and body and maintaining the harmony and health of the whole organism. A thousand years later. in Christian Europe, medicine and music were again closely linked when the church took over the care of the sick and used the chanting of prayers as a means of therapy. And of course, music and dancing have been used as part of the healing arts of so-called primitive peoples throughout the world for no one knows how many millennia. In fact, periodic and ritualized tribal dancing is so commonplace throughout the world, with or without sickness, that its importance can hardly be overestimated.

It is, in fact, very likely that the vigorous dancing that so many people enjoy for long hours is highly effective in working out the tightness of muscles (note the head swinging that accompanies most tribal dancing), providing valuable exercise to those who need it, inducing profound mental and physical relaxation, and binding together the participants in a tighter social unit.

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Tags: employ music to achieve specific health-promoting goals, harmony and health, music therapy