Eye2TheWorld Ezine, Issue 7, article 3, The Body As A Musical Instrument, by Peter Kline

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Issue 7:

Article 3:

The Body As A Musical Instrument by Peter Kline

A commentary on Dorinne Davis' article with additional observations.

It has often been said that the human voice is the most beautiful of all musical instruments. Inasmuch as good singing obviously involves a very significant relationship between the ear and the voice, which extends in the performing of musico-dramatic works, to the entire body, one wonders why the teaching of singing is not considered as important as the teaching of reading. In many cultures music is more important as a means of shared communication that anything else that people do. In modern civilization its true value is rarely recognized.

Dorinne Davis's work centers on the relationship between the ear, the voice and the rest of the body. The body is a sounding board for the voice, and singers pay close attention to how the vocal tones must coordinate of movement of all their muscles, so that the tone is properly supported, and the body's many resonance chambers are properly aligned. That may help to explain why the way the ear interprets sound can affect every aspect of a person's behavior and expression of unique personality.

Music is at the core of the structure of the universe, and we arise out of that universe as a reflection of it. In his book The Harmonies of the World, Johannes Kepler used the notion of the "music of the spheres" to help him arrive at his third law of planetary motion. This law states that the ratio of the square of a planet's year to the cube of its mean (average) distance from the sun is the same for all the planets.

To see how this law reflects a musical relationship, listen in your mind's ear to the Pachelbel Kanon. In the base you hear a slow and regular motion repeated over and over, while in the treble a much more rapid melody is elaborated, getting wilder and more intense until it fades gradually back to a slower, more relaxed state.

With that musical image in mind, imagine the slow movement of an outer planet (Neptune) making its way very slowly around the sun, while an inner planet (Mercury) makes many revolutions for every single one the outer planet makes.

Each of these planets moves in an ellipse, and as it comes closer to the sun it speeds up, and then slows down as it gets farther away.

You can hear this in the music of the Kanon, with the base representing the slow and even motion of the outer planet, while the faster motion of the inner planet comes in the treble. As it gets closer to the sun, you can hear the intensity and feeling of rapidity of its motion increasing, and then, as it moves out and away, that energy again diminishes.

A musical work has this in common with the planetary motions: Each is a demonstration of a variety of elements in a unified pattern of harmony. Because of Keller's laws of planetary motion we feel the universality of the concept of planetary motion. With all its diversity, it comes back in the end to being one thing - or one pattern of motion that is endlessly repeated.

This unity within diversity is common to all the arts, but is particularly noticeable in music, which is based on the illusion of motion.

So, too, the body harmonizes itself in all its movements. By listening to music we can intuitively understand how its different systems move in relation to each other.

Psychiatrist Anthony Storr sees music as the most powerful force capable of giving meaning to life. Showing how language divides up and separates all the elements of our experience, he then demonstrates how music brings them all together. Trillions of cells in the body work in perfect harmony with one another, all led by the conductor at its center - the heart. For many decades as the heart continues to beat, the internal mechanism of the body follows it direction in a dance.

When not functioning well, a person becomes in Ophelia's words in Hamlet, "out of tune and harsh." A person who is out of tune has trouble organizing the body's energy. The internal disorganization is reflected in the external disorganization of everything in the person's life.

More than anyone else, Dorinne Davis has built a therapeutic practice on recognizing that the body's internal harmonies are evolutionary derivatives of the music of the spheres and the harmonies of the world. It is her business to help us tune up our bodies as we might tune up the engine of a car or the strings in a musical instrument. When we are in tune with ourselves we are able to discover and manifest the inner structure of our own personality.

In her great book, Sound Bodies through Sound Therapy, Davis sums up what she does by saying that in her work she is not treating specific dysfunctions of the body.

Instead I look at [the symptoms] as enhancing the person to support himself more thoroughly through sound. Most of the people that I work with have issues with auditory processing to some degree. I say this because it is through the processing of sound that hearing, listening, vestibular integration, proprioception, social interactiveness, emotional connectedness, receptive/expressive language, vocal production (as with song), and body stabilization are established and enhanced. It is also with my experience and knowledge of auditory processing that I have been able to determine that we are able to have Sound Bodies through Sound Therapy.

Davis has discovered the mechanics by which people who are disorganized in their body-mind relationship can be harmonized into a condition that allows them to discover their true nature as learners and thinkers.

Storr explains why this is, and thus why music is so important, so central in human experience that it must take precedence over all the practical things we think we are supposed to be learning in school:

I believe that we have to falsify our experience of thinking if we are to chronicle our thoughts and remember them. We are compelled to make coherent patterns out of our mental processes if we are to retain them in consciousness. Chaos cannot be accurately recalled. Meaningful sentences are more easily recalled than nonsense syllables; and music, the great promoter of order, makes words and sentences still more easily remembered.

This creation of coherent patterns need not be the consequence of conscious deliberation. It is a mental activity which is proceeding in all of us with little intermission. We link things together, combine opposites, create new wholes, out of data which were previously unconnected.

What this means is that it is through the musical part of our being that we learn to order our universe. If the body is not in harmony with itself, it cannot do this and experience is rendered largely meaningless. The musical therapy techniques that Dorinne brings to bear in her clinic have the capacity to organize the body-mind relationships of people with learning problems so that they are able to achieve the mental ordering of a chaotic world that everyone must be able to achieve in order to have a meaningful life.

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