When I was a child, on most Fridays, my dad, mom, brother, and I would travel to Cape Cod to visit my grandparents. For my father, this drive would come after a long day of work, during which he had already commuted from our home, an hour outside of the city, to Boston, where he worked as an accountant, and back home again.
He was an intense man, and during these drives to the Cape we were often silent, on edge—unsure how to interpret his sullen and grave demeanor.
After we arrived, my grandmother would typically begin playing a mix of classical music, folk songs, and pop songs on her spinet piano—and I would watch my dad’s face transform: his jaw would slacken, while the lines between his eyebrows softened, lifting the intensity of thought that always seemed to burden him.
This was my first experience of the power of music.
Nearly two decades later, I learned of music therapy as a profession. I was a rising junior in college and, without hesitation, I switched my major to learn how to clinically wield music’s ability to transform and heal—a power I had observed years earlier.
Music therapy has grown from relative obscurity to a practice that is becoming fairly mainstream, largely due to the advocacy of colleagues in the field, along with media coverage of the burgeoning profession. Jodi Picoult came to Berklee College to study music therapy to develop the main character—a music therapist—of her novel Sing You Home. Meanwhile, following the gunshot injury she sustained, Representative Gabby Giffords underwent rehabilitation efforts that included music-based interventions. Although she initially couldn’t speak, she could sing, an ability that was used to further her speech recovery. And films about music’s capacity for healing and improving quality of life include the recent releases Alive Inside, The Lady in Apartment 6, Landfill Harmonic and The Music Never Stopped.
Doctor-writer Oliver Sacks’ essay collections, like Musicophilia, introduced stories to the public that explained the ability of music to promote skill learning and/or recovery in the face of severe disability and trauma. Research in neuroscience has backed up many of Sacks’ observations. For example, people who have suffered strokes or have been diagnosed Parkinson’s disease are better able to walk while listening to rhythmic music. In the case of strokes, people who can’t talk can often sing. Singing is then used to facilitate recovery of speech. This has been the case of Representative Gabby Giffords.
