MUSIC IS THE BEST   MUSIC IS THE BEST   Willie The Pimp

“Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST.”

In a letter to German poet and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer Bettina von Arnim quoted this line first spoken by her friend Ludwig von Beethoven, whose musical ability had by that point (the early 1800s) taken Europe by storm. In the view of the virtuoso, the unspeakable quality of music to uncover deep emotion and understanding surpasses that of any works by sages and philosophers. For Beethoven, to hear and be moved by a musical composition is to experience the highest intellectual state.

Music as medicine

Researchers are exploring how music therapy can improve health outcomes among a variety of patient populations, including premature infants and people with depression and Parkinson’s disease.

The beep of ventilators and infusion pumps, the hiss of oxygen, the whir of carts and the murmur of voices as physicians and nurses make rounds — these are the typical noises a premature infant hears spending the first days of life in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). While the sounds of such life-saving equipment are tough to mute, a new study suggests that some sounds, such as lullabies, may soothe pre-term babies and their parents, and even improve the infants' sleeping and eating patterns, while decreasing parents' stress (Pediatrics, 2013).

Researchers at Beth Israel Medical Center's Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine conducted the study, which included 272 premature babies 32 weeks gestation or older in 11 mid-Atlantic NICUs. They examined the effects of three types of music: a lullaby selected and sung by the baby's parents; an "ocean disc," a round instrument, invented by the Remo drum company, that mimics the sounds of the womb; and a gato box, a drum-like instrument used to simulate two-tone heartbeat rhythms. The two instruments were played live by certified music therapists, who matched their music to the babies' breathing and heart rhythms.

The researchers found that the gato box, the Remo ocean disc, and singing all slowed a baby's heart rate, although singing was the most effective. Singing also increased the number of time babies stayed quietly alert, and sucking behavior improved most with the gato box, while the ocean disc enhanced sleep. The music therapy also lowered the parents' stress, says Joanne Loewy, the study's lead author, director of the Armstrong center, and co-editor of the journal Music and Medicine.

"There's just something about music — particularly live music — that excites and activates the body," says Loewy, whose work is part of a growing movement of music therapists and psychologists who are investigating the use of music in medicine to help patients dealing with pain, depression and possibly even Alzheimer's disease. "Music very much has a way of enhancing the quality of life and can, in addition, promote recovery."

Music to treat pain and reduce stress

While music has long been recognized as an effective form of therapy to provide an outlet for emotions, the notion of using song, sound frequencies, and rhythm to treat physical ailments is a relatively new domain, says psychologist Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, who studies the neuroscience of music at McGill University in Montreal. A wealth of new studies is touting the benefits of music on mental and physical health. For example, in a meta-analysis of 400 studies, Levitin and his postgraduate research fellow, Mona Lisa Chanda, PhD, found that music improves the body's immune system function and reduces stress. Listening to music was also found to be more effective than prescription drugs in reducing anxiety before surgery (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, April 2013).

"We've found compelling evidence that musical interventions can play a health-care role in settings ranging from operating rooms to family clinics," says Levitin, author of the book "This is Your Brain on Music" (Plume/Penguin, 2007). The analysis also points to just how music influences health. The researchers found that listening to and playing music increase the body's production of the antibody immunoglobulin A and natural killer cells — the cells that attack invading viruses and boost the immune system's effectiveness. Music also reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

"This is one reason why music is associated with relaxation," Levitin says.

One recent study on the link between music and stress found that music can help soothe pediatric emergency room patients (JAMA Pediatrics, July 2013). In the trial with 42 children ages 3 to 11, University of Alberta researchers found that patients who listened to relaxing music while getting an IV inserted reported significantly less pain, and some demonstrated significantly less distress, compared with patients who did not listen to music. In addition, in the music-listening group, more than two-thirds of the healthcare providers reported that the IVs were very easy to administer — compared with 38 percent of providers treating the group that did not listen to music.

"There is growing scientific evidence showing that the brain responds to music in very specific ways," says Lisa Hartling, PhD, professor of pediatrics at the University of Alberta and lead author of the study. "Playing music for kids during painful medical procedures is a simple intervention that can make a big difference."

Music can help adult patients, too. Researchers at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital in Singapore found that patients in palliative care who took part in live music therapy sessions reported relief from persistent pain (Progress in Palliative Care, July, 2013). Music therapists worked closely with the patients to individually tailor the intervention, and patients took part in singing, instrument playing, lyric discussion, and even songwriting as they worked toward accepting an illness or weighed end-of-life issues. 

"Active music engagement allowed the patients to reconnect with the healthy parts of themselves, even in the face of a debilitating condition or disease-related suffering," says music therapist Melanie Kwan, co-author of the study and president of the Association for Music Therapy, Singapore. "When their acute pain symptoms were relieved, patients were finally able to rest."

The healing power of vibration

At its core, music is sound, and sound is rooted in vibration. Led by Lee Bartel, PhD, a music professor at the University of Toronto, several researchers are exploring whether sound vibrations absorbed through the body can help ease the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, fibromyalgia and depression. Known as vibroacoustic therapy, the intervention involves using low-frequency sound — similar to a low rumble — to produce vibrations that are applied directly to the body. During vibroacoustic therapy, the patient lies on a mat or bed or sits in a chair embedded with speakers that transmit vibrations at specific computer-generated frequencies that can be heard and felt, says Bartel. He likens the process to sitting on a subwoofer.

In 2009, researchers led by Lauren K. King of the Sun Life Financial Movement Disorders Research and Rehabilitation Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ontario, found that short-term use of vibroacoustic therapy with Parkinson's disease patients led to improvements in symptoms, including less rigidity and better walking speed with bigger steps and reduced tremors (NeuroRehabilitation, December 2009). In that study, the scientists exposed 40 Parkinson's disease patients to low-frequency 30-hertz vibration for one minute, followed by a one-minute break. They then alternated the two for a total of 10 minutes. The researchers are now planning a long-term study of the use of vibroacoustic therapy with Parkinson's patients, as part of a new partnership with the University of Toronto's Music and Health Research Collaboratory, which brings together scientists from around the world who are studying music's effect on health.

The group is also examining something called thalamocortical dysrhythmia — a disorientation of rhythmic brain activity involving the thalamus and the outer cortex that appears to play a role in several medical conditions including Parkinson's, fibromyalgia and possibly even Alzheimer's disease, says Bartel, who directs the collaboratory.

"Since the rhythmic pulses of music can drive and stabilize this disorientation, we believe that low-frequency sound might help with these conditions," Bartel says. He is leading a study using vibroacoustic therapy with patients with mild Alzheimer's disease. The hope is that using the therapy to restore normal communication among brain regions may allow for greater memory retrieval, he says.

"We've already seen glimmers of hope in a case study with a patient who had just been diagnosed with the disorder," Bartel says. "After stimulating her with 40-hertz sound for 30 minutes three times a week for four weeks, she could recall the names of her grandchildren more easily, and her husband reported good improvement in her condition."

The goal of all of this work is to develop "disabled" and "prescribable" music therapy and music as medicine protocols that serve specific neurologic functions and attend to deficits that may result from many of these neurologically based conditions. Rather than viewing music only as a cultural phenomenon, Bartel says, the art should be seen as a vibratory stimulus that has cognitive and memory dimensions.

"Only when we look at it in this way do we start to see the interface to how the brain and bodywork together."

The echos of the period in American history from 1968 to 1972 have been reverberating recently in ways that many of us cannot help but notice. Civil rights protesters have been meeting the National Guard in the streets. Americans are launching rockets into space. A crooked president is running for reelection on a Law and Order platform. It all seems like an eerie deja vu of a time when, 50+ years ago, a new form of media, namely the television, brought new images and new forms of mass communication to the American public. A new form of media that, just like social media has done in the 21st century, upended American politics and exposed our flaws as a nation for all to see.

But according to most historians of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the echos of the past are just that: echos, nothing more. For one thing, while it is spectacular that Elon Musk’s SpaceX sent astronauts to the International Space Station, it cannot compare to the momentous event in human history that was the moon landing. For another, while Trump and Nixon are very similar in their willingness to engage in corruption, Trump has not been removed from the presidency while Nixon resigned. Social media has perhaps had as much or more of an effect on contemporary society than TV did in 1960s America. But the most visible difference can be seen in the streets. For all the handwringing about “violent Antifa terrorists,” today’s unrest in the streets is nowhere near as violent as the unrest that occurred between 1968 and 1972. It is somewhat difficult for non-historians to evaluate the difference in the level of radicalization among the broader left between now and then. But if overt violence is the metric used to measure this difference, then the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the assassinations of MLK, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy, clearly overmatch the comparatively meager looting and bloody scuffles that have characterized the BLM movement so far.

For example: On October 6, 1969, the Weathermen, a radical splinter group of the Students For A Democratic Society who would later become known as the Weather Underground (WU), blew up a police memorial in Haymarket Square in Chicago. This was to be the first of many bombings the WU would execute throughout the latter half of 1969 and into the early 1970s, including bombings of the Pentagon and the Capitol building in Washington DC. The WU was composed of white students who acted in support of black power movements such as the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Between 1969 and 1974, dozens of different groups emerged from the firmament of late 1960s politics, each committed to the causes of Black Power, anti-war, and anti-police movements. The Panthers and the BLA were particularly aggressive in their confrontations with police and routinely engaged in gunfights with law enforcement in the streets of major US cities, especially New York City. These groups drew in thousands of supporters over time, driven to radical left politics by the oppression of Black people and minorities, the atrocities committed by US troops in Vietnam and Cambodia against communists (to whom American leftists were sympathetic), and the feeling that a wider leftist revolutionary moment was at hand across the world. The Cuban revolution, Maoist China, North Vietnamese communists, Cambodian communists – all of these revolutionary groups had taken up the struggle for freedom, and the WU, the Panthers, the BLA, and the dozens of other less well-known groups who sprang up in the waning years of the 1960s and early 1970s civil rights and counterculture era saw themselves as directly involved in this common global struggle.

Today’s leftists are nowhere near as radicalized as the leftists of the 60s and 70s. There have been no bombings, no assassinations, no organized black militias meeting organized white gangs or police in the streets. America’s cold war enemies are not meeting with leaders of America’s street rebels, as Fidel Castro did when he met with Bernardine Dohrn and other leaders of the WU. Local black liberation groups and splinter groups of the Black Panther party were active in cities across the country, such as the MOVE in West Philadelphia, who’s commune was later bombed by Mayor Wilson Goode in 1985, leading to the deaths of a dozen people, half of whom were children. Today’s leftists cannot boast such metrics of violence, nor would they wish to.

That’s not to say that the contemporary left could not become more violent and more radical in the coming years should conditions favor such a development. One of the more persistent and frustrating aspects of the Trump administration’s responses to the BLM movement has been the overall tendency of the Trump admin to escalate racial and class tensions, rather than de-escalate them. Trump’s approach to the protesters has been what the military would call the “iron fist” approach, which is characterized by heavy-handed crackdowns on peaceful protest. Pundits across the political spectrum have condemned this strategy, and experts in insurgencies have warned that Trump’s tactics will not just fail to restore law and order in the short term but could even lead to the growth of a new leftist underground, as happened in the 1960s when police crackdowns led to the formations of violent radicals across the country. The military handbook on insurgencies, produced by the Rand corporation, explicitly recommends avoiding the Iron Fist strategy, albeit for slightly different but nevertheless related reasons, saying: “historically, [counterinsurgencies] forces following the iron fist path won only 32 percent of the time, while those on the motive-focused or mixed path won 73 percent of the time. Not only have iron fist [counterinsurgencies] efforts failed more often than they have succeeded, but they have almost always involved atrocities or other [counterinsurgencies] force behaviors that are “beyond the pale” by contemporary U.S. ethical standards.”

Should Trump win a second term and continue to meet peaceful protests with the violence of state security forces over the course of the next 4 years, there is little doubt that a new radical underground of leftists will emerge from the firmament of the BLM movement. As I wrote in an article about leftist violence around this time last year: “there is one conclusion that I came to which many Americans might find shocking, especially Democrats and peace-loving leftists: there are more violent far-left extremists in America than one might at first expect, and their ranks are growing.” The propensity for violence is alive and well on the Left, and without a strong pacifist leader like MLK to keep such violence in check, the Left will likely follow the path that many oppressed peoples everywhere tend to follow when confronted by the rise of a fascistic right-wing authoritarian: leftists will likely go underground and they will likely shed blood.

There is some hope that this trend will not play out the same way as it did in the early 1970s. By 1973, the American public had largely turned against leftist violence. Far from sparking a Black communist revolution, the WU was seen as a largely innocuous band of clowns by mainstream Americans. Racism was prevalent enough among white liberals and centrists that the cause of Black Liberation found little traction among those who had supported MLK’s peaceful protests. In the end, by the mid-1970s, when the liberals joined the right-wing backlash against the excesses of the Left, the cause of black liberation – for which many activists across the landscape of fractured and disparate underground groups had sacrificed their lives – faded into the background of a harder 1970s counterculture of drugs, sex, and rock and roll. Gone were the days of the flower children, soon to be replaced by cocaine drug lords and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Hopefully, today’s leftists will avoid making the same mistake of resorting to violence and thereby sacrificing the goodwill support of the people on behalf of whom they struggle. Only time will tell.

Consult a dictionary, and the answer to one of life’s most pressing questions — what is happiness? — can be summed up quite succinctly: a state of well being and contentment. But ask 10 different people what happiness is on a given day and it’s unlikely you’ll get the same response twice, much less in just six words.

While happiness can be universally characterized by feelings of joy, gratitude, and contentment, the roadmaps we use to arrive there are entirely unique. For some, being happy can seem like an ephemeral concept, a fleeting feeling brought on by success or good fortune. For others, cultivating happiness from within is the most worthy pursuit, whether it’s by slowing down and appreciating the present moment, developing a meditation practice, or reconnecting to your purpose. To quote the German-Swiss poet Herman Hesse, “Happiness is a how; not a what. A talent, not an object.”

Many of history’s greatest minds, from the ancient Greeks to modern thinkers, have ruminated on the root of happiness and made some striking observations that may make you stop and think, could this be the key? Through these words of wisdom, a common thread to happiness just might be found — or perhaps many different threads can be weaved together to form your own personal tapestry.

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.
– James Oppenheim

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
– Mahatma Gandhi

Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.
– Pericles

Happiness is not a goal…it’s a by-product.
– Eleanor Roosevelt

I don’t want a job. I have eight acres of fields outside the city wall, enough for vegetables and grain. I also have an acre and a half of farmland nearby, which gives me enough silk and hemp. Strumming my zithers is enough to give me pleasure, studying Tao with you is enough to make me happy. I don’t want a job.
– Yan Hui, a disciple of Confucius

Happiness is not something readymade. It comes from your own actions.
– Dalai Lama

We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.
– Frederick Koenig

Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.
– Alice Walker

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

Happiness depends upon ourselves.
– Aristotle

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.
– Martin Luther King Jr.

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
– Helen Keller

Success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get.
– W. P. Kinsella

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
– Marcus Aurelius

The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

All happiness depends on courage and work.
– Honoré de Balzac

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.
– Seneca

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne

Happiness is something that multiplies when it is divided.
– Paulo Coelho

Genuine happiness can only be achieved when we transform our way of life from the unthinking pursuit of pleasure to one committed to enriching our inner lives, when we focus on 'being more' rather than simply having more.
– Daisaku Ikeda

Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life.
– Benjamin Franklin

Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity.
– José Martí

Of all the means to insure happiness throughout the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.
– Epicurus

The only way to be truly happy is to make others happy.
– William Carlos Williams

Many people think excitement is happiness…. But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

17 Quotes on the Transformative Power of Music

No society on Earth is devoid of music. From the flutes and rattles of isolated Amazonian tribes to the mass gatherings of modern festivals like Lollapalooza, music is found everywhere that humans themselves are found. The origin of music, however, will forever remain a mystery, as it occurred long before recorded history.

The first musical instrument was almost certainly the human voice itself, whether humming or whistling or making some other musical sound. As for constructed instruments, they have been around for an astonishing amount of time. The oldest known musical instrument is quite likely the Divje Babe Flute, discovered in 1995 in Slovenia. If this cave bear femur — pierced by evenly spaced holes — is indeed a Neanderthal flute, then we know that humans have been playing musical instruments for at least the last 50,000 years. The oldest known melody, meanwhile, is the Hurrian Hymn, discovered on a clay tablet inscribed with cuneiform text. It’s over 3,400 years old, and we can still listen to it.

Today, the importance of music is widely acknowledged. It is taught in schools around the world, and is used in everything from advertising to psychotherapy. And anyone who has listened to their favorite song while feeling sad or lonely knows how music can lift the spirits. The following quotes — from philosophers, scientists, musicians, and more — all attest to the transformative power of music: to its strange and wonderful ability to make life better.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.
– Martin Luther

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.
– Thomas Carlyle

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents.
– Ludwig van Beethoven

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.
– Victor Hugo

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
– Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.
– Henry David Thoreau

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music… I get most joy in my life out of my violin.
– Albert Einstein

Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter — to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of unrest to a world of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water.
– Albert Schweitzer, theologian, philosopher, physician, organist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
– Aldous Huxley

Music… will help dissolve your perplexities and purify your character and sensibilities, and in time of care and sorrow, will keep a fountain of joy alive in you.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran pastor, theologian, and anti-Nazi dissident

People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It’s like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.
– Michael Jackson

The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.
– Bruce Springsteen

Music can change the world because it can change people.
– Bono

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does — humans are a musical species.
– Oliver Sacks

I think music in itself is healing. It’s an explosive expression of humanity. It’s something we are all touched by. No matter what culture you’re from, everyone loves music.
– Billy Joel

Music has healing power. It has the ability to take people out of themselves for a few hours.
– Elton John

So I say thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing. Thanks for all the joy they're bringing. Who can live without it, I ask in all honesty. What would life be? Without a song or a dance, what are we? So I say thank you for the music, for giving it to me.
– “Thank You for the Music” by ABBA