Harnessing the healing power of music

The assertion is often made that music is an important catalyst in improving health and wellbeing in a multitude of ways. It is rare, though, to see the theory put into practice so convincingly, and movingly, as was in Setúbal in Portugal in 2019. Then to have the theory itself examined from all directions by therapists, scientists and musicians, suitably interrupted by performances, made the process real and immediately relevant.

This almost exclusively Anglo-Portuguese Symposium arose from a partnership between the Helen Hamlyn Trust and the City of Setúbal, and grew out of the city's annual music festival, reflecting its founding principles of regeneration through the arts.

Setúbal (pronounced Stubal) is a city of significant size 30 miles south of Lisbon at the mouth of the Sado river. From Roman times and probably long before its two reasons for existence were salt and fish processing. For the Romans the result was garum, the fish sauce fermented in stone tanks they used as a burger joint uses ketchup. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries the result was tinned sardines. As with so many industries, by this century the canning factories had closed and the city was left with its pretty old streets cut off from the water by rendundant port buildings and its tower blocks on the outskirts full of people with nothing to do.

A decade ago the mayor, Maria das Dores Meira, was introduced to Helen Hamlyn and they decided to start a festival that used music as community glue. Ian Ritchie, formerly of the City of London Festival and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, arrived in 2011 and stayed until the final festival, which took place virtually, this year.

The event expanded far beyond the festival weekend, with preparations in schools, special needs groups, the immigrants association, the homeless, the local music conservatoire and the elderly, taking place over several months. Enough Youth Group members from the first years went on to study in the UK, returning as the Festival Camerata, providing the professional instrumental backbone, along with the HeadSpace Ensemble from the UK and the astonishing vocal skills and leadership of Merit Stephanos.

‘We involved over 10,000 young people over the years,’ says Ritchie, ‘and we had a rule that every professional has to share the platform with someone who is not. The model doesn’t depend on the pros; it depends on the local people plus the pros and the expectation is that at the performances you will not know which is which.’ That determination paid dividends among the parents too. There were tears of pride as some watched their sometimes profoundly disabled children singing and acting with assurance and expertise. For the mayor there was one simple statistic: Youth and street crime dropped and new community groups have been formed.

The day and a half of the 2019 symposium was packed with speakers, covering everything from therapeutic practice and research to neuroscience. It began with two musicians, the composer Nigel Osborne, who started the Institute for Music in Human and Social Development at Edinburgh University, and the singer/animateur Merit Stephanos from the RCM, a specialist in Arab and contemporary classical, to ‘explore the fluid boundaries between music, theatre, culture and languages’. She examined the festival’s theme, 'Home', and pointed out that while for some it is a peaceful and a shared space for collaboration, for many others it brings a host of contradictions, often pain and loneliness. For many years both Osborne and Stephanos have worked with children traumatised by war and exile.

It was a message taken up by Teresa Leite from Lusiada University. ‘If children have not had the outside of a home, they have not had the inside of it either – or what they experienced inside was not a safe or happy place. This builds into social opposition and resistance. Music helps them self-regulate; to mobilise them to give their best even when they didn’t know they had anything to give.’

Neuroscientist Lee Bartel, from Toronto University, has analysed the effect of music on pain itself and the isolation of dementia. He has found that the cellular and genetic response to music and sound generally is extraordinary. At one level, ‘playing music for two hours changes 70 genetic markers’, and at another, the frequency of 40Hz (basically an E) has been found after a series of sessions to reduce some pain and dementia symptoms in about half of patients by up to 40%.

As well as being programme director of Music for Dementia 2020, Grace Meadows (a bassoonist by trade) heads up music therapy for maternity services at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital so she sees the positive effects at both extremes of human life. ‘Music ripples through the maternity environment,’ she says, seeing maternity as a series of relationships, each of which is helped by the calm and stimulation of music. While it was expected that mothers would benefit she has found one of the most interesting aspects is the way fathers with babies are drawn together by a live player.

On the dementia end of the spectrum she believes ‘music should change the culture of care,’ and should be seen as a proper treatment, whether delivered by musicians or therapists. She illustrates this with the claim that musicians have a five year ‘cognitive reserve’ capable of delaying the onset of age-related brain disease. However, as Amy Mallett of Snape Maltings Creative Campus, says, ‘if practice is to mean something it must go beyond the exercise class.’ It works best when the participants are involved in a project of real artistic quality and invention. It is an aspiration echoed by composer Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian, ‘we need to think big, start small,’ and trumpeter Thorbjorn Hultmark, ‘the sound world we work in is profoundly contemporary by necessity.’