Three New Books Make the Case for Music as Medicine

My colleague Dwight Garner is a great connoisseur of the quotation. I find myself stumbling around this week in the dark corners of the misquotation. Music may indeed have charms to “soothe the savage beast,” as is oft-declared, but the line actually ends “a savage breast,” and is attributable not to William Shakespeare, but to William Congreve, from his 1697 play “The Mourning Bride.”

Now you know.

Music’s soothing and stimulating effect — its use as a kind of medicine — is the subject of at least three books published this year. This is not a new therapy, but a blooming hot spot of research.

I’ve been poking around there for a while, curious to figure out why my mother, a retired professional violist and pianist with advancing dementia, retains so much of her memory (including the ability to sight-read) in this particular realm. She still plays weekly string quartets and piano duos and sings in perfect harmony with Alexa’s somewhat middlebrow choices, though an old game of name-the-composer has faded.

THE SCHUBERT TREATMENT: A Story of Music and Healing (Greystone, $24.95), by the cellist and art therapist Claire Oppert, is a slim but shimmery account of performing on her “forever instrument” for a series of patients with varied afflictions, including the inevitable final one.

Oppert’s father was a beloved company doctor for several theaters in Paris, who himself played the piano, and she has worked with Howard Buten, a professional clown, novelist and psychologist specializing in autism. (This field teems with polymaths.) Though she tangles dutifully with charts, data and analytics, her philosophy is holistic: “trust and gratitude before the splendor of all things: This is life’s foundation, its bedrock.”

Or, more bluntly: “Ten minutes of Schubert is the equivalent of five milligrams of oxy,” the chief of the palliative care unit at a Paris hospital tells her. (Maybe this is why Donald J. Trump played “Ave Maria” at that recent rally-turned-swayfest.)