Kellen Perry, the “harp lady” of O’Connor Hospital in San Jose, California, wheels her five-foot, maple Celtic instrument onto the fifth floor. Standing there in the hallway of the oncology unit, she backs her harp up against the wall and begins to play. Engraved with a caduceus, the dual snakes and staff that symbolize healing, the harp engulfs the ward with soothing sounds, like waves washing against the shore.
And then Perry and her harp are joined by Una Nakamura, who sings—or rather, tones—in a wordless accompaniment. Their duet competes against a cacophony of background noise: water running in a nearby sink, the banging of an oxygen tank being lugged out of a hallway closet, and a loud conversation about an IV drip at the nurses’ station just a few feet away.
But the music is heard. Visitors and family members emerge from behind the closed doors of patient rooms and watch curiously, almost shyly. Nakamura calls her music “a sound blessing,” and although her voice lacks power, it has a gentle, sweet focus.
“Could you come play for my mother-in-law?” a young woman requests, indicating the room at the end of the hall. “She’s a classical Indian violinist, and I know she would love to hear you.” A gaunt, elderly woman with wide eyes and a dignified, almost haughty, expression waits expectantly. Although covered by a blanket, her abdomen clearly is greatly swollen. A urine bag is strapped to the railings of her hospital bed; underneath a pair of royal blue slippers has been neatly placed—the only personal touch in the room.
Perry approaches the patient, takes her hand, and speaks in quiet tones. Four years ago, when a beloved aunt lay dying, Perry recalls, all she could do was to play The Bunny Hop at her bedside. Now a graduate of The Music for Healing and Transition Program, a national certification program that strives to bring live therapeutic music to the bedside of the ill and dying, Perry is steeped in all kinds of arcane musical knowledge. Moving to her harp, she opens with a piece in the pentatonic scale, a five-note scale widely used in the music of China, Japan, and India that is familiar to this woman. In addition, Perry sets it in a low key, explaining later that her intent was to complement the diagnosis of bladder cancer.
Every other week, Perry and Nakamura, herself a breast cancer survivor, come to play for the patients and families at O’Connor, which is one of hundreds of hospitals throughout the country that fund music healers to help patients. Even the nursing staff appreciates the music. “It shifts the energy of the entire ward,” says Perry. “‘Oh good,’ the nurses say. ‘The harp lady is here.’”
And if the appearance of these musicians occasionally surprises patients and their families, the bedside presence of musicians is as old as history itself. People in ancient times used music in healing and ritual on a daily basis: The Bible describes young David strumming his lyre to soothe Solomon’s troubled soul. During the Middle Ages, French monks at the abbey of Cluny traditionally gathered in a circle around the deathbed of their brethren, singing hymns and chanting prayers. For centuries, the monks of Gaden Shartse Monastery in south India have offered up sacred chants for health and healing rituals. These chants, which require years of study to learn and memorize, are still sung today.
It’s no coincidence that the ancient Greeks revered Apollo as the god of both healing
and music. Today, modern medical
centers
are supporting music healers
for the good
of their patients.
In a recent book, The Power of Sound (Healing Arts Press, 2001), San Francisco, California, composer Joshua Leeds addresses the divine origin and nature of sound. The “word” or “one sound” is an idea that cuts across religious beliefs from the Egyptians to the Celts, Chinese, Hebrews, and Native Americans. Leeds notes that Shamans worldwide have “cured disease and mental anguish by coaxing evil spirits into leaving their victims through the power of chanting.”
Indeed, as a growing body of medical research confirms, it’s no coincidence that the ancient Greeks revered Apollo as the god of both healing and music. Thousands of studies suggest significant and measurable benefits that accrue from music. To name but a few:
In 1999, a study at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, reported that premature babies used oxygen more efficiently and grew significantly calmer when tapes of intrauterine sounds and female vocal singing were played in the neonatal intensive care unit.
A 1999 Swiss study, published in Schweizerische Rundschau faer Medizin Praxis, found that more than half of 55 migraine patients treated with music therapy showed significant improvement following a 12-month treatment program.
Listening to music while under anesthesia may help to speed a patient’s recovery from surgery, according to a 2001 study published in Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica. Researchers at a hospital in Sweden found that women who were exposed to soothing music during a hysterectomy experienced less pain, were less tired, and were able to sit up sooner after the procedure. Furthermore, women who listened to music and encouraging words needed fewer pain-relieving drugs and were less likely to feel fatigued after being discharged from the hospital.
In fact, when President Bill Clinton underwent extensive surgery to repair a torn knee tendon in 1999, he chose to forego general anesthesia—in part to avoid invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which addresses the transfer of power to the vice president. Instead, Clinton remained awake during the entire operation and listened to country-western music, including songs by Lyle Lovett, while his lower body was numbed with an epidural.
Neuroscientists at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, report that patients with Parkinson’s disease respond to rhythm therapy by walking measurably faster, according to a 1994 study led by Michael Thaut, director of the Center for Biomedical Research in Music. There also have been striking findings on the effects of music upon people with Alzheimer’s: According to another CSU study, patients emerged from their stupor and spoke lucidly to family members for up to 20 minutes after listening to a half-hour of patriotic and big band music.
It appears, to quote eighteenth-century German poet Novalis, “Every illness has a music solution.” Indeed, music is the gateway to the spirit in virtually every world religion, from Judaism to Hinduism. Even the godless communist Karl Marx was in awe of what music could do. “The power of music is so great,” he once wrote, “that in legends of all nations its invention is ascribed to the gods.” This quote from Marx appears in a little book called Spirit Into Sound: The Magic of Music (Grateful Dead Books, 1999) written by the band’s drummer, Mickey Hart, with Fredric Lieberman. In it, Hart writes: “To me God is a vibration, the original one, the sustaining one, the source of all cosmic and human energy.”
Vibration is at the core of Trudy Charlton’s work as a Tamo-Do practitioner. Invented by French musician and composer Fabian Maman, Tamo-Do is a healing technique that combines chi movement, acoustic sound, and color to achieve a balance of health. An ordained minister from the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment in San Jose, California, Charlton draws upon sounds emitted by vibrating crystal bowls, tuning forks, and 8-foot long gongs to create music that helps treat patients at the Center for Integrative Medicine, also in San Jose. In addition, Charlton works with a monochord table—a wooden table strung with fifty-five strings across its underbelly. As a patient lies on the table, Charlton strums the strings, which are all tuned to the same note: G. Come springtime, she will change the note to A—she explains that these notes were determined centuries ago by yogis and mystics in the yogic tradition.
On a recent morning, Harriet Howell, a demure, silver-haired, real estate agent and music teacher, comes to Charlton for help with her chronic pain in her left knee. Charlton strikes a crystal bowl at Howell’s feet, and a shrill, pure sound fills the room.
Can this really help? Howell believes the benefits are so indisputable that she now pays for Charlton to come to her house once a month and play for her mother, who is bedridden with osteoporosis. After one visit, the ninety-three-year-old woman was able to walk unassisted—and sleep through the night without medication. This is the sort of anecdote is fairly common among those who seek out sound therapy and find relief from their aches and pains. But scientific evidence is another story—mainstream research that would back up such a claim is not in the literature.
And yet, the idea that sound by itself is healing dates all the way back to the blast of the trumpet in ancient scriptures. Indian ragas, or patterns of notes that form the basis for improvisation in Indian music, are historically associated with curative powers, including chronic asthma, sinusitis, headaches, and sleep disorders.
Hazrat Inayat Khan, a Sufi master, addresses this subject in his book The Mysticism of Sound and Music (Shambhala Publications, 1996): “If one can focus one’s heart on music, it is just like heating something that was frozen. The heart comes to its natural condition, and the rhythm regulates the beating of the heart, which helps to restore health of body, mind, and soul, and brings them to their proper tone. The joy of life depends upon the perfect tuning of mind and soul.”
“The universe is all sound,” says Charlton. “Nothing comes into manifestation that isn’t frequency, that isn’t vibration. Everything that exists is vibrating—from solid rock, to the tiniest gnat, to our own DNA.”
Amrita Cottrell was a classical voice student at the University of Hawaii in Hilo a few years ago when she suddenly was diagnosed with breast cancer. After undergoing a mastectomy and chemotherapy, Cottrell was fine—until the cancer returned two and a half years ago. More surgery was scheduled, but Cottrell insisted on postponing it. She went home instead and went to work with her voice, singing long, sustaining tones, screaming, crying, drumming, and playing the didgeridoo, an Australian Aboriginal wind instrument. She did all this for six weeks, and then she went back for the surgery.
“They did the ultrasound to mark the tumors—there were two—and the technician looked and looked,” Cottrell says, smiling at the memory. “Then the radiologist came in, and he looked and looked. The tumors had disappeared.”
Today Cottrell leads a weekly sound meditation of chanting, playing didgeridoos, and drumming at the First Church of Religious Science in Santa Cruz, California. She even organized the First International Sound Symposium, held this March in San Jose, California. Attending the event were more than four hundred participants representing thirty states and eight countries, including Bosnia, Chile, Holland, New Zealand, and Poland.
Music therapy is catching on, and increasing numbers of hospitals and nursing facilities around the country are hiring musicians to play for their patients. The Reverend Barbra Telynor, a singer, harpist, and ordained Protestant minister, was hired by the Stanford University Medical Center, California, to play twice a week for patients in intensive care and critical care units, and even in the emergency room.
Early on, Telynor was called into an intensive care unit at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, California, as a desperately ill man was being removed from life support. His family had gathered around him to say their last goodbyes, and Telynor was asked to play something soothing.
“As I was playing, I suddenly realized that I was connecting with him on a psychic level,” Telynor recalls. “He was scared … And then I realized, it’s not just about music, it’s about using all of myself, all my knowledge and all my experiences.”
Telynor has plenty of personal experience to draw upon. Born with congenital kidney and bladder problems, she spent three consecutive summers in the hospital as a young girl, went into a four-day coma during her senior year of college, and had what she describes as “a traditional near-death experience, with light at the end of the tunnel.”
Twenty-one years ago, Telynor’s sister gave her a kidney—and a second chance at life. Today, Telynor’s harp is a vehicle for creating relationships, a way of connecting soul to soul.
“A month ago at Stanford, I was [working] in the critical care unit, and I was exhausted,” she recounts. “I went into the waiting room to take a break, and a man approached me. He asked about how my harp, how it was made, and it turned out that he was a woodworker. Then we started talking about music, and he told me he was waiting on his son, who’d been blindsided by a drunk driver and was in a coma. And he was struggling with all these questions: If his son came out of it, would he be brain-dead? And if he was, should he pull him off the respirator? Should he forgive the driver?”
Some questions aren’t easily answered. In this case, all Telynor could do was listen, offering her sympathy and the sensitive ear of a musician.
MORE INFORMATION
This article first appeared in the May/June, 2002 issue of Science & Spirit Magazine.
Music without words means leaving behind the mind. And leaving behind the mind is meditation.
Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is sound. — Kabir
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