The Healing Power of Music

How does music heal?

This was the question that inspired my PhD research into music rituals, born out of my 25-year career in music performing, composition, and production. This background enabled me to explore this question ‘from the inside’, through experiencing music in a variety of contexts, both in Australia and Latin America, as well as in the many countries that I toured during my career.

As a young percussionist, I was interested in the varieties of rhythm from across Latin America, and so, I decided to travel the continent learning the rhythms. This led me to study in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Chile, and Colombia, before arriving in Cuba at the age of 21. What I noticed through my travels was a similarity between rhythms from different Latin American countries, similar rhythmic phrases and performance practices, which sprung from a common African musical root. African rhythms and performance practices that were brought to the Americas through the trans-Atlantic slave trade. These elements mixed with local indigenous and European traditions and instruments to create a unique musical blend that we refer to as Latin music and all its varieties.

Cubans rituals

Cuba was captivating for me as a young percussionist because it preserved many of its traditional songs, rhythms, and liturgical approaches descendant from Africa. In Cuba, I experienced rhythms, songs, and dance rituals that were so visceral and powerful that it felt as though it reached deep into my soul. These experiences gripped me and led me to a lifelong obsession with all types of liturgical cultural music.

 Afro-Cuban liturgical bata music uses hour-glass shaped drums of varying sizes and pitches performed by three drummers. They perform a suite of sequential rhythms (toques) for their gods (orishas), while a lead singer (apkwon) sings various songs (cantos) which is responded by the congregation in a call-and-response style. During celebrations, these rhythms often start at a moderate tempo (87-90bpm) and increase to staggering tempos (135-140), increasing the intensity and participation which may lead to heightened states of consciousness. These are occasions when the energy in the space is so high and palatable that a shift in atmosphere and energy occurs, the most intense being associated with the arrival of the orisha gods. In these rituals, collective healing occurs through the alterations of atmosphere that transforms the community, leaving them feeling refreshed, reenergised, and with the satisfaction that they have communed with their ancestral gods.

Catholic Rituals

In the traditional Catholic liturgy, a different musical process is used to achieve healing.  As the priest leads the mass from the pulpit, a choir sings through the various important stages of the mass. These traditional songs often consist of Gregorian chants, holy prayers, and sacred songs in Latin or other languages. The melodies are often accompanied by a church pipe organ, with bass tones that resonate though the  church and high notes that pierce the atmosphere. The music is solemn and beautiful, often in canons that interweave and juxtapose male and female voices, and which reach high points of intensity during the communion. This occurs once the bread and wine,  believed to be transformed into the body and blood of Christ, is devoured by its devotees to signal participation in the life of Christ. The music is most intense, beautiful, and solemn during this stage, when it stirs the devotees emotions to contemplate their transformation through Christ. Through the liturgy and music, the devotees believe they have been purified and healed, leaving them to reassume their daily positions with strength and vitality.

Similarities in approaches to music healing. 

Both of these examples show different approaches to music, with varying beliefs, cultural practices, and aesthetic norms, yet certain similarities exist when considering the question of how music heals.

Firstly, healing does not happen through music alone but through its inclusion in rituals that offer symbols and symbolic actions that are strongly believed in. Secondly, emotional musical triggers such as intensity, beauty, and solemnity play a crucial role in ensuring the music speaks to the emotions of its participants, particularly during the high points in the ceremony when it is believed the god is most close. Thirdly, music supports a metaphysical transformation which results in purification and healing, a visible alteration in the state of its participants. These three aspects form the core elements in the healing power of music.

The cultural development of music healing rituals in electronic music

We may further understand music healing through observing the developments of healing practices across time, culture, and context. My PhD research explored the development of traditional ritual music into modern sub-genres, investigating how ritual music has evolved and transformed into new types of rituals, such as those of modern electronic music events.

An electronic dance party invites like-minded people to participate in music and culture that often results in individual and communal healing. The scene is set with decorations that includes an array of symbols, nature elements that adorn the DJ console, and dress styles representative of the sub-culture and its beliefs. The music begins at moderate speeds and moves in waves of peaks and troughs throughout the night. The main DJ or musical act is reserved for the moment when the energy is most high, when people are most receptive, and often when the effects of drugs and alcohol are most prominent. Promoters will hold off from bringing on their main act to ensure this energy is at a peak, creating anticipation that adds to the intended musical climax.

It is during this main session and climax that the much healing takes place, which coincides with a feeling of union with the collective, the cessation of the thinking mind, and a sense of freedom that conjures people into dance states of ecstasy. The music envelops the participants as their bodies become part of its rhythms and melodies, dancing and participating within, against, and adding to it, so that they participate collectively with the music to become one with the DJ, audience, and space.

Three necessary elements in music healing

The use of three elements- ritual, intensity, and transformation- are integral to the healing effects. Ritual sets up the conditions for the transformation, offering participants a cultural cosmology that helps them believe that a transformation is not only possible, but probable. Intensity is used to move the audience from an ordinary state to altered states, facilitated by the music, drugs, and atmosphere, which is expertly crafted by the musicians, DJs, curators, and reenforced by the culture which has developed an intuitive knowledge of the process and reinstates it through each ritual. Thirdly, the healing goal and outcome is transformation, which is a change of state, often associated with a feeling of oneness, collective unity, cessation of ego thought, and ecstasy which occurs at peak moments during the event.

These three elements- ritual, intensity, and transformation- are necessary for musical healing to take place, and are features of cross-cultural practices as shown through the examples of Afro-Cuban culture, Catholicism, and Electronica. These vastly distinct cultural practices are unified by the fact that humans are psychological beings that yearn for transformative experiences. These transformative experiences are necessary to forget ones troubles and pains, to feel united with the collective, and to reenforce the cultural beliefs and social norms. Yet they also serve a spiritual purpose, for they give us a sense of something beyond us, something intangible which cannot be communicated expect though direct experience. The use of ritual and music enables us to experience ourselves in heightened communion, so that we embody a new identity, one that is unified with the community and often to a higher source. It is an inexplicable feeling that keeps people across the world coming back to music rituals, seeking them out, and leads to neurosis when we are deprived of them.  

Humans will always create music rituals that facilitate transformation, for it is part of our human legacy as a technology for reaching beyond ourselves and progressing into our future selves.

Thanks for reading. If you want more information about these topics then head over www./vincentsebastian.com. Don’t forget to join the newsletter to receive the latest thought-provoking articles and news.  Also, you can check out my ​music​ here.