We all know that music makes us feel better!  It cheers us up, it calms us down, it brings back wonderful memories of love, childhood, holidays, vacations, and our whole lives.  The field of music therapy has provided lots of wonderful information on this and so much more.

The following list is from www.preludemusictherapy.com.  I highly recommend this site to you and encourage you to check out all of the resources it provides!

• Music captivates and maintains attention — it stimulates & utilizes many parts of the brain.
• Music is easily adapted to, and can be reflective of, a person’s abilities.
• Music structures time in a way that we can understand (“that’s the last verse – my exercise session is almost over!”).
• Music provides a meaningful, enjoyable context for repetition.
• Music provides a social context — it sets up a safe, structured setting for verbal and nonverbal communication.
• Music is an effective memory aid.
• Music supports and encourages movement.
• Music taps into memories and emotions.
• Music — and the silences within it — provide nonverbal, immediate feedback.
• Music is success-oriented — people of all ability levels can participate.

If you still have doubts about the power of music in the health and healing world, I urge you to start at the beginning of this blog and read all the way through.  Music is powerful medicine!

Does music affect the behavior of adolescents? This is one of the most frequent questions I get when I go out to speak around the country. I think it’s a bit of a rhetorical questions because we know that music is powerful and does affect people’s behavior, but especially people who are unsure of themselves, who they are, and what they really want out of life. This fits the description of many adolescents. When teenagers feel alienated from peers and family, they are more prone to identify with powerful media personalities and do some vicarious living through them. If these media personalities sing violent music with violent, negative lyrics, it is going to take a toll on them and the adolescent may actually commit violent acts under the influence of this powerful “music.”

I think you’ll enjoy what this physician has to say about it:

After some research, I found Rusty. At our first music therapysession, Rusty came to my father’s bedroom, tuned his guitar, and began to sing. I sang along. My father laid on his back on his bed, unmoving. The only time he opened his eyes was to say good-bye at the end of the music session.
“Don’t worry,” Rusty said to me when he saw my sad face, “It can take some time for people to warm up to me.” But I felt hopeless.
A breakthrough came, however, during the second music therapy session. We began with folk songs, but they had no effect on my dad. Since his real love is chamber music, I started to hum the melody to Schubert’s Trout Quintet while Rusty improvised on his guitar. My father opened his eyes. Then Rusty moved into a syncopated version of “Ode to Joy.” My dad applauded.
With each subsequent music therapy session, my father grew more engaged. During the sixth session, several other residents peeked into my dad’s room. “Come in! Come in!” Rusty and I shouted, and the staff rushed to get additional chairs. Soon there were six other elderly residents in the room, singing and clapping. We sang World War II era songs, and two women even got up and danced, holding on to each other (otherwise they would have both fallen over.)
Now, Rusty comes every Friday afternoon. We’ve moved the music therapy out of my father’s bedroom into a common area where we are joined by a dozen other residents. The music transforms them. One woman, for example, is usually so folded into herself that she reminds me of a flat tire. But, when Rusty strummed the tune to “Old Man River,” she straightened up, tilted her head back, and gave a performance as moving as any Paul Robeson could have done.

There are days when conversation is too hard for my father. But I know now what to do. We sing.  Even as a younger man, my father knew the lyrics to only one song, “Home on the Range.” So, we end our visits by singing “Home on the Range” together. There’s an irony in this. My father and I are New Englanders. We’ve never lived on the range or even seen a wild antelope. But, no matter. The song brings us comfort, and we are both at peace.

  I guess that’s a bit of a loaded question.   Since I am a professional musician who loves music more than the air I breathe and wishes that everyone else did to, of course I believe that you can’t even celebrate the 4th of July without music!  Luckily, I’m pretty sure that many other people feel the same way!

Look back a couple of days at this year’s 4th of July…how much music did you hear that is specifically associated with the 4th of july?  I listened off and on all day long to different radio stations that were playing the standard American patriotic favortes like:

You’re a Grand Old Flag

I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy

My Country Tis of Thee

The Star-Spangled Banner

God Bless America

and so many more!

That evening I moved between orchestras at the Nation’s Capitol, the Boston Pops and a concert in Central Park, NYC.  These included the famous Sousa marches (John Philip Sousa, America’s most famous band composer) and especially “The Stars and Stripes Forever” with it’s famous piccolo solo. 

Why is this music so rousing and pleasing to us?  First of all, most of us have very positive and happy associations with this music and our minds immediately conjure up picnics with favorite foods, our favorite people and fireworks!  Then there’s the factor of the musical instruments used.  Lots of brass, percussion and wind instruments wakes up every cell in our bodies and minds and creates energy that makes us want to get up and start marching around.  That’s the intention and that’s exactly what happens.

There are loads of websites now that will give you the music and the lyrics to all of your favorites.  And of course YouTube has it all too!  Hope you had a wonderful 4th of July celebration wherever you were and heard lots of inspiring music!

Music and medicine are deeply connected. But what kind of music should your surgeon really be listening to?

BY RAHUL PARIKH

iStockphoto/lisagagne/Salon

PopRX is a new weekly column about the intersection of pop culture and medicine.

In 1889 Nietzsche wrote, “Without music life would be a mistake.” As someone who regularly spends a chunk of change on Radiohead and Bright Eyes, I completely agree. I’m not the only doctor who finds nirvana in Nirvana. There’s a reason hospital dramas always feature surgeons listening to — and arguing about — music in the operating room. It’s because music and medicine are deeply connected.

The fascinating links go back as far back as ancient Greece. Apollo, the God of healing, was often depicted with a harplike instrument called a lyre. Some doctors have doubled as musicians. In the 1950s, a group of doctors at the Mayo Clinic started the Notochords (named after the primitive spine in a developing fetus), playing with Duke Ellington and Jack Benny. More recently, NPR ran a story about an orchestra of doctors from Albert Einstein Medical Center in New York.

Surgeons have a particularly profound relationship to music. As Siddhartha Mukherjee noted in his book “The Emperor of All Maladies,” music and medicine “go hand in hand. Both push manual skill to the limit; both mature with practice; both depend on immediacy, precision and opposable thumbs.” A 2008 study, in fact, tested whether musical prowess has any impact on performance during laparoscopic procedures (special scopes that surgeons use to perform minimally invasive procedures). Non-surgeons who had experience playing music performed better at suturing using this equipment than did non-musical participants. There’s perhaps no better example of the facility of the musician-surgeon than Theodor Billroth, a 19th century virtuoso who pioneered surgical techniques to dissect abdominal tumors from the body and whose talent on violin and piano forged a close friendship with Brahms.

But surgeons don’t have to play instruments to enjoy music in the operating room. It’s a regular, enjoyable part of the daily routine and one way a surgeon creates a comfortable atmosphere in a sometimes tense setting. Atul Gawande, contributor to the New Yorker and author of “The Checklist Manifesto,” operates to Modest Mouse, Arcade Fire, the Decemberists and other alternative bands. (He does own a Fender ’62 Stratocaster replica at home, but he says he’s rusty.)

http://www.salon.com/print.html?URL=/mwt/feature/2011/03/07/poprx_music_in_operating_room Page 1 of 2

Salon.com The truth about music in the operating room 3/8/11 11:29 AM

So is operating to music a good idea? Lest you go into a panic the next time you hear Lady Gaga while they’re administering the laughing gas, the answer seems to be yes.

It’s a bit of a tricky thing to prove. It’s far from ethical to take a group of surgeons and measure their performance on and off music while they cut into real patients. But studies have offered some insight into the effects of music on surgical performance. One is from the Journal of the American Medical Association and dates back to the grunge rock era, 1994. In this study, researchers took 50 surgeons and measured blood pressure, heart rate and other physiological markers while they performed a series of subtraction problems. Each volunteer performed this task while listening to self-selected music and, later, music selected by the researchers (“Pachelbel’s Canon in D,” which is supposedly included in a lot of “stress reduction” musical compilations).

It turns out that when surgeons listened to music of their own choosing they had very steady vital signs and performed the subtraction task better than when they listened to Pachelbel. That’s encouraging, though it’s important to note that the surgeons who participated listened to music regularly both in and out of the operating room. So if you’re a surgeon and you think investing in an iPod will make you better with a scalpel and sutures, first ask yourself whether you care for music to begin with.

What about the rest of the operating room team? Anesthesiologists are, of course, indispensable to surgery. Does music help or hurt them? In a study out of the U.K., where 70 percent of anesthesiologists say they’ve been subjected to music in the operating theatre (as the Brits call it), 63 percent of those surveyed said that they enjoyed the sounds of music while they worked. Those in another survey who did not said it was because they felt music reduced their vigilance and impaired communication with other staff members. Not surprisingly, the most distracting tunes were ones they hated the most. On the other hand, another study contradicted any deleterious effect of music on anesthesiologists’ performance: That study measured psychomotor performance, and it didn’t change when subjects were listening to self-chosen music, Pachelbel, white noise or no music at all. Finally, surveys of other O.R. team members (nurses, techs, etc.) indicate that music enhances teamwork and communication among members, though, again, most of those surveyed listened to music regularly on their own time.

The next logical question to ask is: What kind of music should your surgeon be listening to while he or she closes your grapefruit of a hernia or bypasses your clogged coronaries? A study from 1976 suggested that rock (sorry, disco), with its varying rhythm and intensity was best. Other surveys have shown that the preferred genre in the operating room is classical, followed by folk, rock, jazz and blues. But, like the JAMA study I mentioned above, most studies hint that music’s positive effects have more do with the personal preference of the surgeon or the O.R. team than any particular genre of it.

A couple of last points: First, there is a body of evidence that music also helps patients going to surgery, including reducing anxiety before and after an operation; it may help patients cope better with pain, leading to their requiring less pain medicine. Finally, here’s an interesting B-side to this story: Take a listen to a 2001 album called “A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure” by a San Francisco music group named Matmos. The two members of the group, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt, took their recording equipment to the hospital and sampled the sounds of surgery, creating electronica out of them. Highlights include “California Rhinoplasty” and “Lasik.” Let the sounds of cauterized flesh and dripping anesthetic be music to your ears.

– Rahul Parikh

http://www.salon.com/print.html?URL=/mwt/feature/2011/03/07/poprx_music_in_operating_room Page 2 of 2

When I was in high school, I was introduced to the Swingle Singers, singing their fabulous arrangements of Bach preludes and fugues, Scarlatti sonatas, and all kinds of wondrous musical confections.  Only in my later years have I even become familiar with the music of people like Jerome Kern and even then, only because I went to see the film “Mrs. Henderson Presents.”  This song was featured prominently in that film, though not in the arrangement by Ward Swingle.  I just discovered this on YouTube and wanted to share it with my readers.  It certainly cheered up what was becoming a very gloomy evening for me!  I think I’ll listen to it at least 4 or 5 more times this evening to remind myself that music can cure even the gloomiest situation.  Hope you enjoy it too!

Can music actually create love and passion in your relationship? I certainly think so! Almost everyone remembers certain love songs that remind them of the one they love or loved. Music has a powerful effect on the mind-body connection and when things are NOT going well in your relationship, sometime listening to the songs that brought you together and talking about the memories related to those songs can actually begin to soften the hard edges and re-create some of those vibes!
Are you surprises? I have created an ebook for your with specific step-by-step exercises you can do with your spouse or partner. Click here to get an immediate download of Creating Love and Passion with Music. I think you’ll like it!

The performer is actually a neuroscientist and had the ability to have a little keyboard created and take it into an MRI machine to show the difference between the brain processing pre-composed music and the brain processing improvised music. What do you prefer?