The Power of Music

It was legendary Robert Nesta Marley who sang that "one good thing about music is when it hits you, you feel no pain". The powers of music is innumerable, especially its healing powers.

That was why Oliver Sacks, best-selling author and professor of neurology at NYU School Of Medicine wrote that "music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more – it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”

Musicians as prominent as Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen have spoken publicly about mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, and all can attest to the power of music to help with such problems.

Numerous scientific and psychological studies have shown that music can lift our moods, combat depression, improve blood flow in ways similar to statins, lower levels of stress-related hormones such as cortisol, and ease pain.

Music can improve the outcomes for patients after surgery. A recent study reported in Nature Neuroscience even demonstrated that levels of the feel-good chemical dopamine in the brain rose by up to nine percent when people listened to music they enjoyed.

Though the idea of music as a balm is nothing new – more than 400 years ago, William Shakespeare said that “music can raze out the written troubles of the brain” – people are turning to music as a way to deal with the stresses of modern digital-driven life.

Matt Haig, the author of the inspirational book Reasons To Stay Alive, recently set some of the words of his book to music on an album made with former Razorlight drummer Andy Burrows.

In his book, Haig says that the way to escape time is music, and that sentiment would echo with the acclaimed composer, pianist and producer Max Richter.

The German-born Brit guest-curated the Peaceful Music playlist, co-created between Universal Music Group and Apple Music, precisely to help people find “a useful place to rest” amid the frenzy of modern life.

According to Maria Popova, futurist, Aldous Huxley celebrated music an expression of the “blessedness lying at the heart of things.”

Philosopher Susanne Langer considered it “a laboratory for feeling and time,” whose mysterious power both eclipses and illuminates all the other arts.

“Without music life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche proclaimed in 1889. A century later, music actually, literally saved Oliver Sacks’s life. In a very different way, it had once saved Beethoven’s.

Deepening the quest, Popova notes that while many great writers have composed fervent raptures about the singular power of music, one of the most beautiful and penetrating comes from the forgotten pioneer Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) — the intellectual epicenter of Transcendentalism, who sparked the women’s emancipation movement with her epoch-making 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century and whom Emerson considered his greatest influence.

On the pages of the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial and the influential New-York Tribune, where she served as America’s first female editor of a major publication and the only woman in the paper’s newsroom, Fuller wrote about art, literature, and music in symphonic essays that opened innumerable hearts to the potency of the arts as a force of cultural change and shaped the sensibility of generations.

Many of these essays were later collected in Fuller’s 1846 book Papers on Literature and Art which the young Walt Whitman devoured, recommending it heartily on the pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and tearing out one of the essays to save among his most precious papers.

Written by Kelechi Deca