Renée Fleming/Photo: Andrew Eccles Decca

Last year, over Thanksgiving weekend, I developed an ear infection, the first of my adult life. It took six weeks, four antibiotics, two visits to the emergency room, and one curious primary-care physician to resolve. The pain was bad, but worse was that I lost hearing in my right ear during the course of the illness. The accompanying vertigo and pressure made listening to music almost impossible. As the date for my children’s school holiday concert neared, I dreaded going. When I arrived, the scene in the school cafeteria was one of anticipation. Groups of bilingual elementary schoolers sat on the floor at the foot of the stage; their families, friends, teachers and siblings crowded into the remaining space, spilling out into the hallway. My youngest wore a red nose and tail; my oldest had practiced holding an invisible burro’s rein until his gestures were right on beat. The ambient noise made my head throb, but as the classes filed up into their rows, I turned my good ear toward the stage.

Most people instinctively understand the connection between music and well-being. We need only to hear an old song to take a walk down memory lane; we sing to soothe our babies and to teach our children; we share mixtapes (or playlists) with friends; we select a song to commemorate a marriage. Music, regardless of genre, is a means of connection, solace, movement, education and emotion.

“Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness,” the new anthology edited by Renée Fleming, explores all of these aspects of music and more. The book amplifies and underscores its central premise—music is beneficial to human well-being—from myriad angles, featuring a diverse mix of essays, from the scientific to the personal, by artists, scientists, researchers and educators. All share the opinion and experience of music as a bridge to healing.

As it turns out, those working on the intuition that music (and, by extension, all art) is essential to the human experience and has a positive impact on our quality of life and overall health, are right. Music’s influence on the human brain is intricate, far-reaching, and, thanks to the research, quantifiable.

In recent years, classical vocalist Renée Fleming has made it her mission to bring attention—and importantly, funding—to the intersection of music and wellness. She collaborates with programs like the National Institute Of Health’s Sound Health Initiative, and she hosted a video series called “Music and Mind LIVE,” which, like the book that shares its name, brought together artists and scientists to discuss the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics. As Fleming writes in her introduction, “My hope is that this anthology will introduce readers to the scope of current research and practices that result in powerful health benefits of music and the arts, so that they might share the awakening that I experienced when I discovered the extraordinary breadth of this emerging field and its implications.”

Indeed, the breadth of the book makes it difficult to summarize. While there is some disagreement over whether humans are culturally or biologically musical, differences which cognitive psychologist Aniruddh Patel elucidates in his essay, maybe in the end it doesn’t matter which is correct. What matters is music’s powerful place in human development. “Music and Mind” contains sections on music in clinical settings, arts engagement in education, music as therapy, research methodology, and more. If the book covers an expansive number of possibilities, most results point to the same finding: music has profound significance in terms of our quality of life. For example, music therapy helps psychiatric in-patients explore their feelings and build awareness toward extended recovery; underserved youth thrive when given access to free high-quality music education; those living with Parkinson’s find ease of movement in dance classes; songs can be used to help bring language back to those experiencing post-stroke aphasia.

Neuroaesthetics is a “subdiscipline of cognitive neuroscience that… investigates the neurobiology of aesthetic experiences.” It takes as a starting point the brain’s extraordinary capacity for neuroplasticity (essentially, the brain’s ability to grow and evolve, even after traumatic injury) and explores the means by which arts-based therapy can benefit those living with degenerative neurological diseases like MS and Parkinson’s; PTSS; neurodivergence; chronic pain and long COVID. The discoveries in this field have the potential to influence the cultural conversation about what place music and the arts will occupy as we move into the future. Research of this caliber is necessary to fund more educational and therapeutic programming, as well as convincing insurance companies to get on board with coverage.

Renée Fleming/Photo: Andrew Eccles

Fleming’s legacy includes tenure as the first creative consultant for the Chicago Lyric Opera, where she adapted “Bel Canto,” Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel about a female opera singer held hostage alongside a group of businessmen in an unnamed South American country, for the stage. In her characteristically thoughtful essay, Patchett recalls of choosing Roxane’s vocation, “I had seen a grown man transfixed by the voice of a soprano. I knew such things were possible.”

Sound is all around us, all the time. Sound permeates barriers, like walls, in ways that visuals cannot; sound carries on air currents and even comes to us via our skin, which absorbs sound via receptivity to vibrations, something I learned while reading Joanne Loewy’s essay on music psychotherapy. Researchers are drawn to the “biopsychosocial model” that music presents: music can be both passive and active, individual and universal; it affects the body and the mind, the community and the culture.

Interestingly, there’s room in this discussion for silence, too. The world around us is noisy—becoming noisier by the minute, especially as we return to something like normal post-pandemic—and the constant barrage has negative consequences for all living beings, humans included. Neuroscientist Nina Kraus, in her essay, writes: “Sound is one of the vectors by which all living organisms are linked in unified ecology.” Because human-generated noise disrupts this connection, it impairs our “neural differentiation of the constituent parts of common sounds,” among other things. Indeed, what I missed least during my bout with half-silence was the omnipresent growl of my neighbors’ leaf blowers and riding lawn mowers, because thanks to climate change, yard clean-up now enjoys an extended season.

“Music and Mind” is a thorough, persuasive body of evidence for the healing power of music. Read it as both source and inspiration; the anthology is a monumental achievement and a timely reminder that we neglect the arts at our own peril. To echo Deborah Rutter, president of the Kennedy Center, as she so powerfully phrases her movement away from the expression “art for art’s sake”: “I now believe in art for life’s sake.”

The bilingual program my kids attend brings together English and Spanish speakers from across a city whose schools are considered “underperforming.” Music and art persist here, despite the odds. Often, at school events, families of bonded classmates don’t speak the same language. This can be challenging, but it is also inspiring to watch our children help us bridge gaps. That day in December, in the acoustically imperfect cafeteria that still smelled of industrial gravy and green beans, with only half of my hearing intact, I witnessed a community form, united in the enchantment of our children singing “Mi burrito sabanero” and doing the Reindeer Pokey, together.

“Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness”
Edited by Renée Fleming
Viking, 464 pages