Music Is Good Medicine

“MUSIC IS GOOD MEDICINE: Exploring the creative self through song catching”

Background thoughts on “song catching” “Songwriting” in the modern sense, is a more commonplace word for a traditional Native American concept of “Song Catching”. The song catching idea emphasizes that there is a spiritual type of stream where all music exists. Humans are sometimes “given” songs from this stream, or more often they try to “catch” them. Some songs are easy to catch and some songs are more difficult. People can catch/write songs from many different cultural perspectives and in many different musical styles. Most songs have a need to be shared with other people. Many Native American cultures also have a belief that each individual has their own song. This personal, spiritual song has deep meaning and is often found only through participation in ceremony and can be very private. Some contemporary songwriters are more willing to acknowledge that the “gift” of song comes from s spirit greater than them. Almost all songwriters/song catchers from different cultures speak of being suddenly “inspired” to write at least some of their songs. Here is what some people who know about this have to say . . .

Quotes on the healing power of music

Mickey Hart (drummer for The Grateful Dead): Music has been used as entertainment for so long, people forget it’s a powerful medicine. . . . The body is a rhythm machine, and when the coordination stops, disease sets in. . . . Rhythm is there in the cycles of the seasons, in the migration of the birds and animals, in the fruiting and withering of plants, and in the birth, maturation and death of ourselves.

E. Thayer Gaston (former head of the University of Kansas Music Therapy Department): The performance of music usually brings a sense of gratification, feelings of accomplishment and mastery. Music has order and predictability and both are essential for competence. Music permits and encourages each person to participate dynamically in his/her own growth and change. . . . Music, by its very nature draws people together for the purpose of intimate, yet ordered function. It unifies the group for common action and it is this setting that elicits or changes many extra-musical behaviors. . . . Music is shaped by culture, but in turn influences that culture of which it is a part . . .”

Barbara Crowe (past President of the National Association from Music Therapy): [Music] can make the difference between withdrawal and awareness, between isolation and interaction, between chronic pain and comfort; between demoralization and dignity.

Senator Harry Reid (Democrat from Nevada during hearings on Music Therapy): Simply put, music can heal people.

Your Own Thoughts:

Andy Hunt, MSW [email protected] Quotes on the Song Writing/Song Catching Process

From an Internet web site on songwriting: The song writing process is a combination of inspiration, perspiration, love, hate, elation and frustration. There is a mysterious essence about the entire processes, which when analyzed cannot be summed up in a simple procedure. I am often amazed at how the idea for a new song is generated either by a sudden visualization of the song, or by the careful manipulation of musical elements into something new, or through a long evolved series of events, perhaps even over a series of years. All pieces start out with some kind of inspiration . . . this inspiration is they mysterious part, because it is impossible to locate the origin of these thoughts. Without inspiration, the songwriting process is hard work, trying to fit together pieces in an incomplete puzzle. This is where musical knowledge comes in, which can aid in what to do next, however, even theory can’t finish a song that doesn’t want to be finished.

Sherman Alexie (from his book Reservation Blues): Thomas went home and tried to write their first song. He sat alone in his house with his bass guitar and waited for the song. He waited and waited. It’s nearly impossible to write a song with a bass guitar, but Thomas didn’t know that. He’d never written a song before. . . . But the song would not come, so Thomas closed his eyes, tried to find a story with a soundtrack. . . . For hours, Thomas waited for the song. Then, hungry and tired, he opened his refrigerator for something to eat and discovered that he didn’t have any food. . . . As his growling stomach provided the rhythm, Thomas again with his bass guitar, wrote the first song and called it “Reservation Blues”.

John Lennon (The Beatles): I’d spent five hours that morning trying to write a song that was meaningful and good, and I finally gave up and laid down. I thought of myself as Nowhere Man sitting in his nowhere land. Then “Nowhere Man” came, words and music, the whole damn song, as I lay down...... you could say that [Paul McCartney] provided a lightness, and optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, a certain bluesy edge, There was a period when I thought I didn’t write melodies, that Paul wrote those and I just wrote straight, shouting rock ‘n roll. But, of course when I think of some of my own songs -- “In My Life”-- or some of the early stuff – “This Boy”-- I was writing melody with the best of them.

George Harrison (The Beatles): I decided to write a song based on the first thing I saw upon opening any book – as it would be relative to that moment, at that time. I picked up a book at random, opened it, saw “gently weeps” then laid the book down again and started the song [While My Guitar Gently Weeps]. Some of the words were changed before I finally recorded it.

Paul McCartney (The Beatles): You’d immediately walk over to the piano with [producer] George Martin, and he’d say, “What was the melody you were singing, Paul?” I remember that one from “Yes It Is”, because John [Lennon] would sing the melody and we’d have harmony lines all over the bloody place, but it was great: you each had to learn this new tune. And then George [Harrison] would have another tune…really quite cool. But we were used to doing it, so the minute we all sang it together it was, ‘Oh, oh that’s good!’ . . .

Andy Hunt, MSW [email protected]