Sound Choices: Using Music to Design the Environments in Which You Live, Work, and Heal

by Susan Mazer and Dallas Smith

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Carlsbad, CA: Hay House 1999 228pp. $16.95 2 1/2 pp of references and resources. Book comes with CD.

Susan Mazer and Dallas Smith are musicians who have gifts for music in words as well as in playing their instruments - reflecting a healing presence through the instruments of their personhood.

Each speaks for her/himself, creating a pleasant discourse, stimulating tension of similarities and differences, and harmony in their coming together to share their explorations of bringing music as healing into medical environments that ordinarily are stressful and anything but healing.

In addition to its aesthetic value perceived by how it sounds, music transforms time and place. Therefore, using music to create life- enhancing environments shifts the relationship between music and listener from one that is content- based- that is, entertaining or distracting- to one that is contextual, expressing and supporting a purpose beyond itself. Ultimately, music accompanies the process of life, enhancing and enriching our capacity to live it. (p. 9)

Music, both historically and in the present, ahs been linked to the power to heal, control, incite, lure, seduce, celebrate the word of God, and spread the word of others. (p. 12)

In our personal efforts to understand the dynamic between music and listener, we found that, beyond its capacity to entertain and enrich, music gives structure and expression to both time and place, defining circumstance and meaning. Our task as artists, we determined, was to create music so engaging that time becomes timeless, reality changes, and life is created anew. Thus, what has perhaps not been acknowledged is that music creates an afterlife consisting of the moments and years following a life- changing performance. (p.11)

Mazer and Smith describe how they birthed and are maturing their skills in using music in hospital and other healthcare settings.

Our sole purpose was to help patients and staff experience the clinical environment as shiftable space- space that can be transformed from fearful to safe, from strange to peaceful. Only then would it have the capacity to hold the wide range of emotional and physical events that occur in the transition from disease to recovery, from degeneration to regeneration. (p. 15)

From the first note, everything seemed to change. Music in the hospital setting was like an aural oasis- a distraction and an offering, entertaining and ritual. This environment demanded that we leave our egos at the front door along with our needs as performers. We were not going to have the benefit of the usual audience applause, acknowledgement, or any other tangible way of determining whether our music was sufficient. We had to accept the fact that for someone gravely ill, our presence might be inconsequential, the least significant event. At the same time, for those patients listening to the music drift down the long halls and into their rooms, our music could be the most important event of that afternoon. (p. 14)

Susan: I remember taking an undergraduate course on the psychology of music that was both interesting and frustrating. As I plodded through the cumbersome, and, for me, foreign language of behavioral science, I found little that I could relate to, as either a performer of a listener. My coveted musical experience is uniquely mine, I thought, hardly to be dissected, analyzed, and reduced to a psychological diagnosis that would make a contrivance of my experience! I feared that this scientific inquisition might ruin the magic by implying that my emotional responses were actually manipulations acted upon me. It would be like revealing how a magic trick is done. If that were true, I could be left with only a musical trap door- one that wo0ulod make my fears and stresses disappear artificially, as if the effects of music were some kind of smoke- and - mirrors sham. (p. 13)

Excellent presentation of music for healing. The authors are sensitive to the healing qualities of the instrument that is the musician - through which the music flows. Reading the book is a healing experience in itself.

Other CDs (also good holiday gifts!):
Heart to Heart - produced in conjunction with St Luke's Episcopal Hospital, Houston, TX as part of a comprehensive healing environment (http://www.stlukestexas.com/ )

Crossroads of the Heart - Music of electro-acoustic harp and various wind instruments (from flute to electronic wind instrument) that soothes without being boring. While the composers make no claims for the healing effects of their music, the essence of their healing presences is felt through their music. http://www.healinghealth.com/ http://www.soundchoices.com/

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