THE SPEAKING TREE
Healing Power of Good Music

Plato said: “Philosophy is the highest music.� He could with equal accuracy have said that music is the highest philosophy. How else can we explain the deep feeling that Plato''s teacher, the redoubtable Socrates, had for music? The wisest of Greeks, he took to practising the music of Dionysus while he lay in prison, to ease his mind.
The cultures of antiquity believed that music could bring about a renewal of the divine balance that ideally characterises human life; that it could restore the harmony of the human psyche in times of disquiet and distress.Indeed the ancients regarded all forms of sickness — mental or physical — as being ultimately musical problems.
A sick man, it was thought, had lost his inner strength; his harmony of being was said to have slipped from synchrony with the laws of the cosmos. Which was precisely the reason why music was used to bring about a patient''s realignment with the cosmos in its form of universal sound.
Even more than in medicinal herbs, the ancients placed their faith in the healing powers of music to cure illness. Music was used as a key healing method by the ancient Hindus, Chinese, Persians, Egyptians and Greeks; indeed, Homer''s lliad and Odyssey celebrate the moments when the spread of a plague is halted by sacred hymns and Odysseus'' wounded knee is healed by the “chanting of lays.�
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, often took his mentally disturbed patients to the Temple of Asclepius, to make them listen to healing music. To Pythagoras, good music was consonant with the rhythm of life. Paracelsus used the metaphor of ‘musical medicine'' to indicate a form of therapeutic music composed to deal with specific anomalies; this prefigured, in several ways, the idea of mediaeval minstrels playing music for patients in convalescence.
In 19th century Naples, music was used to cure patients, especially the mentally ill. William Congreve wrote: “Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast�.
Today, even though there are few music therapists, they have brought about a change. They are pioneers in a materialistic world, being convinced about the potential capability of music to affect a wide variety of cures, in conjunction with, or apart from, conventional medical treatment.
As a universal curative, music has the power to affect the human organism at the deepest levels; it can heal the cause underlying the disease, rather than merely suppress visible symptoms. Music can rectify various kinds of emotional disorders; it can even calm an angry mind.
Some behavioural psycho-logists have even reported how the mentally distur-bed have spent quiet nights, without sleeping pills, under the influence of re-corded music. If music can bring about such seemingly miraculous effects at the outer level, it can also move minds in more subtle ways: played in certain modes, it can instigate violence and exploit the motives and weakness of its listeners, whipping them up into states of frenzy and hatred.
But, equally, music can soothe the senses, invigo- rating its listeners with a notion of the good, filling them with the purposes of the noble and create an atmosphere conducive to philosophical reflection.
Ultimately, it can serve as a path to the spirit; by healing and calming the outer personality, it can propel you into the discovery of your self. In so doing, it can act towards a gentle but complete reorganisation of the self. As Claudio Monteverdi, the great composer of operatic music, phrased it “The end of all good music is to affect the soul�.