Many
claims are made about the actual power of music to heal well
beyond it's ability to help us relax and inspire higher thought.
I have no personal knowledge of the validity of these claims,
so I've selected some quotes from around the internet of comments
made by people about music's impact on them or those they work
with:
"Music therapy has been an invaluable tool with many of our rehabilitation patients. There is no question that the relationship of music and medicine will blossom because of the advent of previously unavailable techniques that can now show the effects of music."
Mathew Lee (Acting Director, Rusk Institute, New York)
"(Music therapy) can make the difference between withdrawal and awareness, between isolation and interaction, between chronic pain and comfort -- between demoralization and dignity."
Barbara Crowe (past president - National Association for Music Therapy)
"Before I had surgery, they told me I could never walk again. But when I sat and listened to music, I forgot all about the pain."
Ida Goldman (90-year-old testifying at Senate hearings)
reported by Reuters 8/1/91
"Doctors can heal the body, but it is music that uplifts the spirit."
Mother Teresa
"The marvels of God are not brought forth from one's self. Rather, it is more like a chord, a sound that is played. The tone does not come out of the chord itself, but rather, through the touch of the musician. I am, of course, the lyre and harp of God's kindness."
Hildegard of Bingen
"Our music, whose eternal being is forever bound up in its temporal sounds, is not merely an art, enriching beyond measure our cultural life, but also a message from higher worlds, raising and urging us on by its reminders of our own eternal origins."
Bruno Walter
"Music possesses much richer means of expression and it is a more subtle medium for translating the 1000 shifting moments of the feelings of the soul."
Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky
"To strip human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities with spiritual fervor, to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral; to make divine things human and human things divine: to reach the heart of every noble thought..."
Pablo Casals (regarding the music of Johann Sebastian Bach) |
