Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Ted Gioia enriches and makes real the powerful message that music is, and has always been, an integral part of the toolkit that ordinary humans have used to navigate life. He shows that, far from being a pastime to fill idle moments or a distraction from everyday preoccupations, music addresses fundamental issues of human existence, survival, and liberation. Gioia's work offers hope to those who fear that the corporate mass media may have suffocated the age-old impulse of ordinary people to make music their own."--John Sloboda, author of "Exploring the Musical Mind"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Healing Songs

Duke University Press

Contents

PREFACE..................................................ix1 The Rhythm Within......................................12 The Incantation........................................183 Native American Healing Songs..........................344 The Shaman.............................................495 Orpheus the Shaman.....................................696 The Harmony of the Spheres.............................897 Music and the Medical Practitioner.....................1098 Music Therapy..........................................1249 From Singing Bowls to Sonic Birth......................14210 Reclaiming the Drum...................................15811 Do Healing Songs Work?................................170NOTES....................................................183RECOMMENDED LISTENING....................................211BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................215INDEX....................................................233

Chapter One

Stop for a moment, and consider the rhythm within. Your heart pulsates at roughly the same tempo as Ravel's Bolero, an insistent seventy-two beats per minute, some thirty-eight million times during the course of a year. Twenty thousand times each day, you inhale and exhale, mostly oblivious to the process. Each day, your body's circadian rhythms run through a repeating cycle: the pulse rate and blood pressure rising upon wakening and temperature increasing during the day, declining at night. Even your hours of sleep are comprised of repetitive cycles of around ninety minutes' duration. Your endocrine and immune systems run through their own diurnal cycles. Cholesterol, stomach acid, blood sugar, hormones-all ebb and flow at predictable points during the day.

Your body, like a musical instrument in an orchestra, must synchronize its performance to the contrasting and complimentary rhythms surrounding it. Different parts of the body-receptors in the retina, the pineal gland in the hypothalamus, even the back of the knee-attempt to coordinate the pace of internal processes with external time. Yet the patterns are so ingrained that the organism resists change. Just as flowers continue their patterns of opening and closing even when removed from sunlight, the human body finds it difficult to adjust to changing time zones and settings. Like a piano out of tune, it cannot adapt to the other instruments, no matter how hard we pound the keys.

And the consequences can be severe if we deliberately run counter to the rhythms our body demands. Despite the best-laid plans of industrial engineers, the night shift is not a normal human cycle. The body fights back. Errors, mishaps, bad judgments, accidents all show a staggering rise during these hours of darkness. The disasters that beset the Titanic (11:40 PM), Chernobyl (1:23 AM), the Exxon Valdez (12:04 AM), Three Mile Island (4:00 AM), and Bhopal (12:40 AM) were all triggered between the hours of 11 pm and 4 am. A disproportionate number of car accidents also take place in the predawn hours. No, the late night collisions are not just a case of drunken drivers coming home after the bars close down. Even stone cold sober motorists are more susceptible to collisions and crashes at this supposedly quiet time on the roadways. Why? Our bodies simply refuse to perform at a peak level during o-peak hours. And though we may try to force them into a regimen of our choosing, biology ultimately holds the upper hand in this struggle.

The health problems of night jobs have been well documented. Women who work late shifts show a dramatic increase in the incidence of breast cancer; the danger rises both with age and the number of hours spent doing night work. We might think that over time our bodies would adjust to the demands of the "other" nine to five; in fact, the opposite is true. The more years spent doing night work the more deleterious its impact. For women who have worked more than thirty years on this schedule, their relative risk of breast cancer increases by some 36 percent. The risk of heart disease, moreover, rises 40 percent for night shift workers. A host of other disorders have been linked to graveyard duty-an ironic name given the growing body of evidence connecting it to rising mortality rates-including ulcers, obesity, digestive problems, and high cholesterol levels.

As these studies show, even our ailments are hindered or encouraged by the rhythms of our life. Osteoarthritis symptoms are at their worst late in the day, while rheumatoid arthritis inflicts its greatest pain in the morning. Hay fever sufferers are most vulnerable early in the morning, when the body's levels of cortisol and adrenaline are at their lowest point of the day. Fever, angina, asthma, high blood pressure and a host of other disorders attack according to a rhythm of their own choosing. Even heart attacks follow a predictable cycle: a disproportionate number occur in the early morning hours. Some have even speculated that cancerous cells and normal cells operate on different cycles, offering hope that certain times may be more advantageous for treatment. The new discipline of chronotherapy has emerged in response to this growing understanding that medical regimens need to conform to these cycles. With the advance in our comprehension of these body rhythms, we are learning that there is an ideal time during the day to take a pill, have a workout, eat a meal, or pursue a myriad of other tasks.

The daily cycle may be the most pervasive of all-it is what musicians call the ground rhythm, the dominating pattern that sets an overriding tempo to our life's activities. Over one hundred body functions vary on a predictable twenty-four-hour schedule. But this underlying pattern operates in rhythmic counterpoint with other cycles. Some are longer, the body observing monthly, yearly, or seasonal changes. Others are shorter, such as the rhythms of sleep mentioned above, where we find three to five recurring cycles taking place each night.

Not just physiology, but even the most calculated and apparently rational decisions show allegiance to recurring patterns. Marriages peak in June. Births are most common in late summer. Even suicide-the most individualistic of acts, one might suppose-marches to the beat of its own drummer. As the day gets longer in spring and early summer, suicide rates increase, then fall in tandem with the lessening of sunlight in the winter. Even during the day, suicide rates follow the sun, so to speak, rising around the middle of the day. This tendency is especially surprising given that depression seems to follow an opposite cycle, peaking in the winter months. Violent crimes increase during the hotter months of the year, as do riots and other social upheavals-note how many countries celebrate their independence day during late spring and summer. Even hospital admissions for schizophrenia tend to rise during warm weather. Both psychological and physiological factors seem to be at work here-each perhaps following its own rhythm. One of the great enigmas of biology is the often-hypothesized correlation between the movements of the moon and the menstruation cycle of women. Indeed, the full moon seems to have a number of odd effects on people, as the...