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Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness
World-renowned soprano and arts/health advocate Renée Fleming curates a collection of essays from leading scientists, creative arts therapists, educators, healthcare providers and artists about the powerful impacts of music and the arts on health and the human experience
A compelling and growing body of research has shown music and arts therapies to be effective tools for addressing a widening array of conditions, from providing pain relief, to enhancing speech recovery after stroke or traumatic brain injury through singing, to improving mobility of individuals with Parkinson’s disease using rhythm.
In Music and Mind Renée Fleming draws upon her own experience as an advocate to showcase the breadth of this booming field, inviting leading experts to share their discoveries. In addition to describing therapeutic benefits, the book explores evolution, brain function, childhood development, and technology as applied to arts and health.
Much of this area of study is relatively new, made possible by recent advances in brain imaging, and supported by the National Institutes of Health, major hospitals, and universities. This work is sparking an explosion of public interest in the arts and health sector.
Fleming has presented on this material in over fifty cities across North America, Europe, and Asia, collaborating with leading researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners. With essays from known musicians, writers, and artists, as well as leading neuroscientists, Music and Mind is a groundbreaking book and the perfect introduction and overview of this exciting new field.
A compelling and growing body of research has shown music and arts therapies to be effective tools for addressing a widening array of conditions, from providing pain relief, to enhancing speech recovery after stroke or traumatic brain injury through singing, to improving mobility of individuals with Parkinson’s disease using rhythm.
In Music and Mind Renée Fleming draws upon her own experience as an advocate to showcase the breadth of this booming field, inviting leading experts to share their discoveries. In addition to describing therapeutic benefits, the book explores evolution, brain function, childhood development, and technology as applied to arts and health.
Much of this area of study is relatively new, made possible by recent advances in brain imaging, and supported by the National Institutes of Health, major hospitals, and universities. This work is sparking an explosion of public interest in the arts and health sector.
Fleming has presented on this material in over fifty cities across North America, Europe, and Asia, collaborating with leading researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners. With essays from known musicians, writers, and artists, as well as leading neuroscientists, Music and Mind is a groundbreaking book and the perfect introduction and overview of this exciting new field.
592 pages, Hardcover
First published April 9, 2024
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April 16, 2024Essays. Recommended by Ann Patchett and one of her booksellers
May 7, 2024
To sing is to use the soul-voice. It means to say on the breath the truth of one’s power and one’s need, to breathe soul over the thing that is ailing and in need of restoration. S. E. HALE
Music may have had evolutionary advantages, and the brain seems to have a “music room” where musical sounds receive special attention. Cardiologist Jacquelyn Kulinski has discovered something about voice that surprised even me. Singing is athletic to a degree, certainly for classical singers’ unamplified voices, but they has shown the benefits of singing in a study with patients with cardiovascular disease. Just thirty minutes improves endothelial function, or blood vessel health, in otherwise sedentary patients. FRANCIS S. COLLINS
Amazing and broad view of how humans and music are intertwined and part of each other, and how much more research is needed to show the value many of us know instinctively.
Music is a human universal: it exists in every society we know of, both now and throughout tens of thousands of years of human history. And just as languages differ across societies, so do their musics. The richness and breadth of musical expression is astonishing, and its ubiquity tells us that it is an important part of what it means to be human. Many of us find that our musical experiences are the most profound in our lives. ANIRUDDH D. PATEL
Music appears to activate nearly every region of the brain that has so far been mapped, not just a single “music center.” Like vision, music is processed component by component, with specific neural circuits handling pitch, duration, loudness, and timbre. Higher brain centers bring this information together, binding it into representations of contour, melody, rhythm, tempo, meter, and, ultimately, phrases and whole compositions. ANIRUDDH D. PATEL
Sound fills the space surrounding you and me and connects us when we speak. Sound is alive. Sound is a presence. We have no script when we talk. A good conversation has a rhythm and is outside either person’s control to direct. When we’re truly listening to each other there is reciprocity, reverberation, and tunedness; psychiatrist and scholar Iain McGilchrist calls it “betweenness.” NINA KRAUS
When I play my banjo, particularly my handmade gourd or minstrel banjo, I feel the connection to all that history flow through my fingers; I feel the spirit of countless nameless people who tried to make life a little bit better by plucking its strings; by listening to one another, and trading licks; I feel the power of sound. And to a brain steadily fed a diet of instant, digital, and shallow connections, it is deeply calming.
During the pandemic, people were grateful for the concerts we streamed to help them through tough times. While the music helped to bring people together, the concerts were hard for us performers. There is something extrasensory, almost spiritual, about a live physical performance that you can’t replicate through a screen. There’s a feeling of alchemy when actual molecules are disturbed directly by the sounds in the room, and that those changed molecules are journeying from instrument to ear. RHIANNON GIDDENS
Even the Earth creates a tone as it revolves around its axis—a B-flat, to be specific, though many octaves below what our ears could hear. And for some reason, our music has tuned in to it. The drone of the tanpura is often tuned to B-flat; when women sing in India, their standard tonic is the key of B-flat. It is considered that our Earth is Mother Earth; Shakti, the female energy of our life, comes from its very strong energy.
We all know that love is an important element in our lives. Whether you go all the way back to Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, Abraham, Zoroaster, Confucius, or Vyasa, they all have said the same thing: love thy neighbor, be at peace with each other, do good, be happy, be pleasant. And one of the elements of music is that it injects a happy thought inside of you. Even when you listen to a sad song, and there might be tears in your eyes, you smile and appreciate how beautifully that emotion was conjured. This is the thought process that has existed from time immemorial. We as human beings are sometimes led astray and forget that; maybe this is the time when that’s happening, and we’re on a different track. But somewhere along the line, through music, we will come back to the mutual understanding of ʾāmīn (Quran), amen (Bible), and shanti (Gita or Ramayana)—peace, truth, and trust in one another.
ZAKIR HUSSAIN
The idea that singing can promote health and well-being has been contemplated for thousands of years. As early as 400 BC Hippocrates and others theorized about the benefits of singing alongside the development of the practice of medicine.
When we sing, our voices and our bodies are the instruments. We are intimately connected to the source of the sound and the vibrations. We make the music, we are immersed in the music and we are the music. . . . The self is revealed through the sound and the characteristics of the voice. The process of finding one’s voice, one’s own sound, is a metaphor for finding oneself.
JULENE K. JOHNSON
Together, our synthesis is a variegated quilt enveloping and forming our experiential selves. Here, we gently pry open a few of the countless seams of this quilt, for you to glimpse the vast cosmos aflow behind each thread. Everything written and perceived thus is a snapshot of this ever-churning process that will change and morph with the flow of learning and living. As we look out into these spaces, played within the hinterlands, may we carry this deep knowing in our daily lives.
Music begins. Or as it seems to me, a latent current of music surfaces into and through the group. Swells and flurries and whispers of rhythms, harmonies, melodies, textures, turnarounds, vamps, lyrics, counterlyrics, choruses, and so forth emerge. In the unfolding milieu of music are ample moments of friction, seemingly arrhythmic pulses, awkward silences, clashing notes, senses of participatory trepidation and participatory overindulgence, and even sounds that are truly incomprehensible. There also emerge supremely subtle interpersonal musical dynamics I have no vocabulary for. MARISOL NORRIS & ESPERANZA SPALDING
Music may have had evolutionary advantages, and the brain seems to have a “music room” where musical sounds receive special attention. Cardiologist Jacquelyn Kulinski has discovered something about voice that surprised even me. Singing is athletic to a degree, certainly for classical singers’ unamplified voices, but they has shown the benefits of singing in a study with patients with cardiovascular disease. Just thirty minutes improves endothelial function, or blood vessel health, in otherwise sedentary patients. FRANCIS S. COLLINS
Amazing and broad view of how humans and music are intertwined and part of each other, and how much more research is needed to show the value many of us know instinctively.
Music is a human universal: it exists in every society we know of, both now and throughout tens of thousands of years of human history. And just as languages differ across societies, so do their musics. The richness and breadth of musical expression is astonishing, and its ubiquity tells us that it is an important part of what it means to be human. Many of us find that our musical experiences are the most profound in our lives. ANIRUDDH D. PATEL
Music appears to activate nearly every region of the brain that has so far been mapped, not just a single “music center.” Like vision, music is processed component by component, with specific neural circuits handling pitch, duration, loudness, and timbre. Higher brain centers bring this information together, binding it into representations of contour, melody, rhythm, tempo, meter, and, ultimately, phrases and whole compositions. ANIRUDDH D. PATEL
Sound fills the space surrounding you and me and connects us when we speak. Sound is alive. Sound is a presence. We have no script when we talk. A good conversation has a rhythm and is outside either person’s control to direct. When we’re truly listening to each other there is reciprocity, reverberation, and tunedness; psychiatrist and scholar Iain McGilchrist calls it “betweenness.” NINA KRAUS
When I play my banjo, particularly my handmade gourd or minstrel banjo, I feel the connection to all that history flow through my fingers; I feel the spirit of countless nameless people who tried to make life a little bit better by plucking its strings; by listening to one another, and trading licks; I feel the power of sound. And to a brain steadily fed a diet of instant, digital, and shallow connections, it is deeply calming.
During the pandemic, people were grateful for the concerts we streamed to help them through tough times. While the music helped to bring people together, the concerts were hard for us performers. There is something extrasensory, almost spiritual, about a live physical performance that you can’t replicate through a screen. There’s a feeling of alchemy when actual molecules are disturbed directly by the sounds in the room, and that those changed molecules are journeying from instrument to ear. RHIANNON GIDDENS
Even the Earth creates a tone as it revolves around its axis—a B-flat, to be specific, though many octaves below what our ears could hear. And for some reason, our music has tuned in to it. The drone of the tanpura is often tuned to B-flat; when women sing in India, their standard tonic is the key of B-flat. It is considered that our Earth is Mother Earth; Shakti, the female energy of our life, comes from its very strong energy.
We all know that love is an important element in our lives. Whether you go all the way back to Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, Abraham, Zoroaster, Confucius, or Vyasa, they all have said the same thing: love thy neighbor, be at peace with each other, do good, be happy, be pleasant. And one of the elements of music is that it injects a happy thought inside of you. Even when you listen to a sad song, and there might be tears in your eyes, you smile and appreciate how beautifully that emotion was conjured. This is the thought process that has existed from time immemorial. We as human beings are sometimes led astray and forget that; maybe this is the time when that’s happening, and we’re on a different track. But somewhere along the line, through music, we will come back to the mutual understanding of ʾāmīn (Quran), amen (Bible), and shanti (Gita or Ramayana)—peace, truth, and trust in one another.
ZAKIR HUSSAIN
The idea that singing can promote health and well-being has been contemplated for thousands of years. As early as 400 BC Hippocrates and others theorized about the benefits of singing alongside the development of the practice of medicine.
When we sing, our voices and our bodies are the instruments. We are intimately connected to the source of the sound and the vibrations. We make the music, we are immersed in the music and we are the music. . . . The self is revealed through the sound and the characteristics of the voice. The process of finding one’s voice, one’s own sound, is a metaphor for finding oneself.
JULENE K. JOHNSON
Together, our synthesis is a variegated quilt enveloping and forming our experiential selves. Here, we gently pry open a few of the countless seams of this quilt, for you to glimpse the vast cosmos aflow behind each thread. Everything written and perceived thus is a snapshot of this ever-churning process that will change and morph with the flow of learning and living. As we look out into these spaces, played within the hinterlands, may we carry this deep knowing in our daily lives.
Music begins. Or as it seems to me, a latent current of music surfaces into and through the group. Swells and flurries and whispers of rhythms, harmonies, melodies, textures, turnarounds, vamps, lyrics, counterlyrics, choruses, and so forth emerge. In the unfolding milieu of music are ample moments of friction, seemingly arrhythmic pulses, awkward silences, clashing notes, senses of participatory trepidation and participatory overindulgence, and even sounds that are truly incomprehensible. There also emerge supremely subtle interpersonal musical dynamics I have no vocabulary for. MARISOL NORRIS & ESPERANZA SPALDING
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