Musical Connections

Autistic students account for almost half of the enrollment in music therapy classes offered by Heartsong, a music therapy organization based in Scarsdale, New York. The November 4th New York Times also notes:

Music has proved to be a successful treatment for all ages and many conditions, ranging from developmental disorders to learning difficulties like A.D.D. and A.D.H.D. to physical disabilities like cerebral palsy to syndromes like Down, Fragile X and Rett. Music therapy is also used to treat adolescents with behavioral issues; people struggling with substance abuse, psychiatric illness or head injury; and Alzheimer’s patients.

A recent profile in Seed Magazine of neurologist Oliver Sacks, who has written about autism in books such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, suggests why music might be so successful in treating these conditions. Sacks’s most recent book, Musicophilia is about the mind and the power of music, and of how music has aied people with differing neurological conditions:

One of the final stories in Musicophilia is that of Clive Wearing, an English musician and musicologist who was struck by a severe brain infection that decimated his memory. As a result, Clive lives inside brief parentheses of time, just a few seconds long. “Desperate to hold on to something,” Sacks writes, “Clive started to keep a journal. But his journal entries consisted, essentially, of the statements ‘I am awake’ or ‘I am conscious,’ entered again and again every few minutes.”

The only thing that comforts Clive is music. When he is playing the piano, Clive is suddenly “himself again.” A Bach prelude can’t recover his past, but it does allow him to be fully immersed in the present tense. He can share, if only for a moment, the emotions of the melody. The music is a “bridge across the abyss,” a temporary relief from the terrifying loneliness of his amnesia.

Sacks relays numerous similar stories of musical healing—in many instances, an awareness of music is a person’s last awareness. “I have seen deeply demented patients weep or shiver as they listen to music,” Sacks writes. “Once one has seen such responses, one knows that there is still a self to be called upon, even if music, and only music, can do the calling.” He likes to quote a shard of a T.S. Eliot poem: “We are the music while the music lasts.” For Sacks, the line is literally true. He knows that music is often the final means of human connection, our closing form of comfort. It is what we have when we have nothing else.

Charlie did music therapy when he was 3 years old: The sessions mostly seemed to involve a smiling teacher singing to him and playing on the piano, while Charlie ran around the large room and drummed on an old radiator. Even then we knew that music was something Charlie always responded to and often took a lot of delight in; he preferred music toys, CD players, and cassette tapes and CDs. It was definitely a great moment in my life when he began to take piano lessons in July 2006 and playing has become a surefire way of helping him to focus and also to do something that he simply enjoys. Music is a way that Charlie connects with Jim and me, emotionally, directly—-last night Charlie was humming “A Love Supreme” and I joined in and soon we were singing the words of the title back and forth in a call and response.