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February 1, 1923
MUSICAL COURIER
MUSIC AS A THERAPEUTIC MEASURE
By Robert L. Sumwalt, G. E.
Copyrighted, 1923, by The Musical Courier Company.
there were no disturbances afterwards and that the patients rested peacefully.
At one time in his life, in the capacity of engineer it was the writer’s pleasure to help remodel the Lenwood Hotel, at Augusta, Ga., into a psychopathic hospital. During the remodeling patients were admitted and opportunity was given to study them from all angles and to see them “in action.”
Being a lover of music myself I can appreciate what music might mean to a patient. Some experiments have been tried on patients with pleasing results. Recently the writer tried an experiment on one of the excited patients here. This man talks continually, never carrying one thought. We retired to a quiet place where there would be no interruption—the pianist and the writer as violinist were the performers. The first piece played was a violin solo, the Meditation from Thais. This was followed by some lighter numbers such as Alice Blue Gown, Whispering Love Nest, etc. During the playing of these pieces there was no noticeable effect on the patient. These numbers were followed by A Long, Long Trail and a few one-steps in quick time. During the execution of these pieces the patient began stamping his foot and his face became flushed. It was quite evident that this was the sort of music that appealed to him. After the playing of one of these numbers the patient began singing by himself, which was followed up with a chorus of the rest present. After the singing of a few songs he was able to concentrate on the song throughout. This alone shows some encouragement as it must be realized that this patient continually drifts from one thought to another.
Much has been said and written about the value of music in hospitals, but apparently no one had ventured to prescribe definite pieces for particular ailments before Mrs. Isa Maud Ilsen, director of hospital music in reconstruction hospitals for the American Red Cross. Mrs. Ilsen now occupies also the chair of musicotherapy in Columbia University, New York. In her own words, she is ‘trying to coordinate music with living and making the former the greatest possible instrument for Americanization.” She had a wide experience before the war in the use of music in curative and penal institutions, and now believes that the time is near when a musical director will be as indispensible an officer in a hospital as an operating surgeon. Of her first class in Columbia University, twelve are now engaged in active musical work in civil hospitals and other institutions. In Allentown, Pa., is a hospital that requires its nurses to take a two years’ course in voice culture to qualify for work in the institution. Says a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, describing Mrs. Ilsen’s work:
“If you are troubled with insomnia, why not try a seren-ade ?
“To be really up-to-date, you should have a fling at musicotherapy. If you suffer from sciatica, or shell-shock, or lumbago, or housemaid’s knee, take a harmonic prescription. A barcarolle or a sonata may bring you out of the Slough of Despond into new life.
“If this has a flippant sound it •is not because the practitioners of the new system of healing do not take it seriously. ...	.
“Prior to the time when the reconstruction hospitals were placed in charge of the Red Cross, Mrs. Ilsen carried on her work of applying music in the treatment of the wounded under the Commission of Training-Camp Activities of the War Department.
“For years before the outbreak of hostilities, Mrs. Ilsen applied her scientific training and musical skill in a series of experiments on the afflicted in prisons, insane asylums, and homes for ׳the incurable and feeble-minded, as wejl as in divers large industrial plants, and the experience in these places was brought to bear when the test came in the military hospitals in Canada, where she served first at the beginning of the war. In 1918 she came back to this country as director of hospital music under War Department auspices.”
The value of music as ammunition was demonstrated during the world war. Long hikes were seemingly shortened by the singing of songs. Weary stragglers took heart and gathered courage to continue trudging through the mud. In the recreational huts, at rest camps, into the streets, music was carried by the dough-boy, and the songs they learned as rookies were sung when veterans.
A Red Cross nurse tells the story of an Italian who was convalescent in her ward. Every effort to awaken in him an interest in life was useless. He merely stared moodily at ceiling and wall and turned an apathetic ear to the jests of his buddies. The nurse was feeding him a bowl of soup one day when one of the men entered the ward carrying a guitar. The face of the Italian lighted instantly, he reached for the instrument. Soon he was strumming it gaily. And as he leaned his ear affectionately toward the polished body he said:	.
“You bring me soup for my body but this is soup for my soul.” From that day the patient improved marvelously. Music had been the needed medicine.
Observing the effect of music on the men suffering from amputation, wounds and sightlessness, Lieutenant Reed, director of singing of the Atlantic Division, has carried song into the home for the insane. In speaking of his experiences in singing with the insane. Lieutenant Reed described his first visit to the Messiah Home, where the shellshocked men are treated.
“As I approached the building I saw a man kneeling, supported by a crutch. He was crossing himself, praying, believing, I suppose, that he was kneeling before an altar. Entering, I found a group of men crying, and their tears were born of real grief. One of the men had been crying for two days, a nurse told me. Relapsing into the sleep of sheer exhaustion, he would waken to burst again into tears. Turnnig from this group I saw some ten or twelve enter; they had the look of imbeciles, as if no thought could dawn in their brains.
“These were the men with whom I was to sing. What should I sing? A song with too decided a rhythm might startle them, a sad song would not do. ‘Give them the (Continued on Page 66)
“The war has had a tremendous influence on musical conditions in this country. All that will come out of it is not known yet. But this we know:
Music has a greater place today in the life of the average citizen of the United States than it ever had before, and there is growing everywhere a realization of the need of it and the influence it is bound to have for the good in the hard years of reconstruction ahead of us.
“I don’t mean reconstruction in the sense of putting up buildings that air raids have knocked down. I mean something deeper, and that something is spiritual reconstruction, and development of mutual understanding and esteem between all types and classes of men in America, the cleansing of our natures of the hatreds that the war brought on. This isn’t an easy thing to do. I feel certain it is one of the most direct and popular methods to be found to work effectively in bringing about the best fruits of peace. The Government discovered the value of music in war time. It is no less indispensable today, when we face the possibility of a revolution. In this country as well as others, there is ample material for a revolution sweeping enough to shake the very foundations of society.”
Prof. Spaulding further states in his article that
“Working hours, the ethics of strikes, a thousand other problems must be de It with, and at once.
But what does a physician do when he has diagnosed a disease? Does he try to remove the symptom of the disease or the disease itself ? The only way you can cure social and industrial unrest is not only to alter external and immediately pressing conditions, but to go deeper, to get the hearts of the men, not forgetting to open your own in the process. And I say that nothing works better for such an end than music. Music is a universal language, obviously.
It is also a marvel-us nervous and emotional outlook Men who are lonely, moody, resentful and in a foreign land can with a very little encouragement be brought to shoot up the town. But tell me if you think that such sentiments can be harbored if people get together, listen to music and perform or sing in concert? The two things are different elements which cannot be made to occupy the same place at the same time.”
Our big business men know the part that music plays in their lives and that is having a wonderful effect on the people in general. A lecturer on music might shout his lun^s out impressing this fact, but when the men and women of this country in love with efficient, clean dealing, with personal initiative and energy which eventually spells success, see a man like Pierre du Pont and Charles Schwab advocating musical culture and confessing to the aid it has given them in crowded hours, they begin to think of the subject from a new
viewpoint.	,	,
The use of music in the treatment of the insane was started by the ancient Greeks about 2,000 years ago and what they wrote about its effect is just as good as anything that has since been written. They observed that the patients were interested and quiet during musical performances. since then there has been a good deal of empirical work and thought done on the effect upon the individual as to touching his emotions and through them affecting the innervations of his bodily segments and in that way being brought to bear to counteract influences of an opposite character. This thought and work, however, have never ׳been subjected to scientific study. There is no doubt that there is a real problem buried in this mass of material, but it is one about which we can do very little other than guess at the present
Dr. John D. Robertson, president of the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium of Chicago, in an article under date of July 22, states:
“The time is coming when music will be a thera-peutic agent, in every hospital and asylum. It is a remedial agent, and in a well ordered world it would play a tremendously more important part than
it plays now.	.	,
“Music appeals to every man and to every animal and it should play a greater part in the preservation of health. There are certain psychic forces that put the system going with the universe, and music is one of the strongest of these forces. One does not need to be told by a specialist that music can calm the nerves of a convalescent patient and put him in a proper mental attitude that will hasten his cure, for this a matter that can be observed by everybody.
Not all can realize, however, that jazz, sometimes called music, can irritate and excite a patient and induce a deplorable condition of jangled nerves that will seriously retard his progress toward recovery.
“Jazz is an influence opposed to the promotion ot health. It appeals neither to the aesthetic nor the physiological nature, and were erand^ opera to be written in ragtime, or, what is worse, m the present day jazz style, instead of gripping attention ot its audience and carrying a message of beauty to¡ then-minds, it would jangle them out of tune with all that is normal and sensible. But I think that jazz operas, if there were any, would die a natural death.
Dr. Robertson further states that “children should be so developed that music will appeal to them always, just as it does in childhood, for music strikes a responsive chord in the nervous system, and therefore reacts directly and powerfully upon health.
Dr. Frank E. Leslie, while Medical Officer in Charge at the U. S. Public Health Service Hospital No. 62, Augusta, Ga forbid the playing of jazz music to the patients during entertainments. He noted that after an evening of Jazz music there were more records of fits ־and slee:pie s‘ among the patients than during any other time. The effect of classical music was noted and the nurses reported that
TO the Greeks, music had reference to any act over which the Muses presided. In the present day the word is restricted to that special art which makes use of the phenomena of sound in order to re-act upon the auditive sensation of the brain. In medicine, music signifies that art which gives harmonic life to the aesthetic emotions which in turn exercise a most powerful influence over the human organism.
The ancient Greeks thought the flute could affect a cure and they gave as their belief this quotation: “Soul was refreshed and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.” It was their belief that if one were bitten by the tarantula there was no way of saving life except by music.
It was customary, therefore, for whole bands of musicians to traverse Italy in such efforts.
In 1892 Dr. J. Ewing Hunter made a study of the therapeutical virtues of music with a piano placed in a sick ward.
He stated that the diminution of pain was very marked in many cases and that seven out of ten noted cases were benefited in so far as a reduction of temperature was recorded.	, .	, ,	,,
Dr Beschinsky, a Russian physician, attended a three-year old child in 1896 who suffered from sleeplessness due to night terrors. He advised the child s mother to play one of Chopin’s waltzes. The effect was immediate and satisfactory.	, ,	,
Dr. Bourdois de la Mothe attended a young woman who for eighteen days had been suffering from a severe fever. Her pulse was extremely weak. On leaving the sick room one day he saw a harp in another room of the house and it occurred to him to try the effect of music. A harpist was sent for who on arriving played during half an hour without any visible change having been noticed in the state of the patient. Music was persisted m, however, and ten minutes after the patient began to breathe better, her feet grew warmer, the pulse became stronger, and after a hemorrhage from the nose she began to speak once more and became convalescent a few days later. This indicated the influence that the mind exercises over even infectious_ diseases. Music m this case was the determining factor in the production of a
favorable crisis.	.
Dr. James T. R. Davison, formerly senior house surgeon to the Liverpool Royal Southern Hospital, states: “Music exercises its influence over the human organism in the relief of pain. Pain is a special condition of the sensorium felt as distress and is due to a special stimulation of central or ־ peripheral origin. Music is likewise a special stimulation which, traveling from the periphery by other routes, reaches the sensorium and there gives rise to a sensation felt as pleasure. In the sensorium these two sensations have to struggle for existence as they cannot exist simultaneously, and whichever of the two adapts itself more comfortable to the then reigning cond'-tions of that central organ will gam the day. When the victorious sensation is that of pleasure, pain will cease to exist, but as the conditions of the sensorium are not exactly identical in any two cases music will sometimes be powerless to dislodge pain from its stronghold.”
An attempt was made in 1895 to translate sonorous into color music. Wallace Rimington, an artist, constructed an instrument called by him the color organ. Rhythm and variety of combination were applied to color. The or^an had a keyboard and each note its respective color which was reflected upon a screen when played. The ordinary spectrum was represented by an octave. Music from Chop and Wagner was represented in color and it is said that it produced a pleasing sensation. We know what influence color plays on a sick person. The lowest note in this scale (that is to say, that one which t be perceived by the brain produces the lowest number of vibrations per second) is red and this color is by no means associated with sadness, neither is violet, which is the highes: note in the chromatic scale, associated with joy. In this connection, Dr. Davison
states that	, r 1
“In the therapeutic estimation of the value ot col-ors the tonality of these cannot have reference to their positions in the chromatic scale, but only to those which they respectively hold through tradition or association in the mind of different individuals.
Dr Esther L. Gatewood of the SJiool Research DePart־ ment of the Thomas A. Edison Music Research, conducted some interesting experiments during the summer of 19 on fifty children. The experiments were conducted to ob^ tain the constancy of musical effect on the basis of listeners reports The music was furnished by phonograph records, and young women who acted as subjects were each given a data sheet so made out they had only to check the terms which described the way they felt beiore the music and aftei • the music. Dr. Gatewood states that “the amount of agreement in the reported effects varied from forty-five to ninety-one per cent.” She states that they further compared the leading effect by which I mean the effect which was recorded bv the most observers on one occasion with the leading effert on another occasion and in only two out of ten rec-
0rpsy^ho-anaiysis *teaches us to compare, the mind to a house and its thoughts to the furniture it contains. Some of the furniture is unsightly, covered with dust, broken or ugly. We clear it all out-throw it away, and the mind is clear. But we must replace this furniture or the house is useless. So we place a beautiful piece here and another there, until the house is habitable again. The furniture which we throw awav are the old worries and in this theory are called pressions The more difficult work is the introduction of new ideals which can be more easily produced through music.
Music is having a foremost place in this reconstruction ncrind and it is doing much to heal the sorenesses that exist SSl mankind, as well as to b;'״e ״'־sen ־־1״« *« ״'״'»״
yard,'in an-article which appeared in the New York World, said in part: