BlogI was invited to speak at a seminar back in October about my thoughts on music & wellness...here's what I said:
First of all, I am a musician, a composer and I operate my own recording studio.
I hope to provide you with a few brief comments on my view of the relationship of music and wellness. I will avoid presenting a scientific analysis of music and its effects on the neural or biological systems.
I will describe how music can lead to feeling good and overall wellness.
In my world music focuses the mind in the “present moment.” Think about how often your mind wanders off while you are doing any number of activities, including listening to me…but when music is present we listen to that moment. We move with the sound of the notes, not back in time, but forward with the notes. Some of us not only respond to music by just listening, but also by tapping our fingers or singinging with the melody. The vibrations, the beat and rhythm of the music put us in that moment. In that shared movement we are together, we are human and in a communication.
Music can be written that will cause joy, reverie, or energy. It can cause us to move to move or have moments of peacefulness. Other music may cause us to feel gloom or lethargy. So music clearly not only can move our bodies together, but also our emotions.
Wellness is often described as feeling good, being in high spirits or being happy. All of these wellness descriptions share the “being in the present moment” condition.
I use this as my definition of what music does.
One describes wellness as “an in the moment condition.”
At a given moment one might not be well, but then your goal would be to attain wellness, because not feeling good or being ill is not a normal human goal. Anything that can focus my mind into a place or time that is in the present and only connected to the vibrations of the notes and the relations of those notes to previous notes contributes to my achieving wellness.
Music can help one attain the mental and emotional feeling of being well. This is a good positive step towards feeling good.
Anything that can focus my mind into a place or time that is in the present and connects to the vibrations of the notes and the rhythm of the melody contributes to my achieving wellness.
While I am not a philosopher or psychologist in this discussion. I am saying that by being in the moment of music can contribute to returning me to feeling good and total wellness in time.
Music alone is not the solution to all wellness issues, but we know if we are feeling depressed there is music that will lift our spirits. We know things that we cannot adequately describe or that become too dry or too scientific to hold our attention. Music holds our attention or we stop listening. Just like with music, when we stop listening there is just noise or silence. With music there can be emotional moments of joy, feeling good and wellness.
©2007 C. Hunter Johnson
