/View.info/ The muse of music Euterpe is truly great. Its mysterious property – to influence not only feelings, but also our entire organism, has long been known to medicine. Even in ancient times and especially in the Middle Ages, doctors knew that properly selected melodies and instruments control the psyche, soothe and even heal the soul.
But then why don’t all musical sounds heal us? What actually happens in our organism when we listen and perceive music?
Biochemists say the following:
– A piece of music is actually sequentially arranged signals with a frequency of 10 to 20,000 hertz. They permeate the air and are all around us, influencing the chemical processes in our organism and the metabolism in it. And we meditate, cry or feel real pleasure listening to the music, and in our body one or another biochemical process occurs. This is what scientists say.
You may not believe it, but melotherapy exists
Music and medicine – a still under-explored connection, both by doctors and musicians. In fact, its beginnings are lost in antiquity, when melotherapy was highly valued and practiced by a number of doctors and scientists. During the Middle Ages there were many itinerant musical healers. In southern Italy, for example, a fast and highly rhythmic Neapolitan tarantella/ dance/ was used to relieve pain after a bite from the black tarantula spider/ hence the name of the tune. In France, during the time of the Sun King Louis the Fourteenth, sufferers of the same disease listened to an entire orchestra of flutists playing to the point of exhaustion. The doctor Hecker from Paris claimed that “the sick could not stand the false notes at all, which even increased their suffering!”
The famous physician and scientist Recamier of the 17th century prescribed tambourine for indigestion. The history of medicine in Spain claims that King Philip the Fifth was cured of severe hypochondria not with medication, but with the help of the angelic singing of the court singer-castrato Farinelli / whose story we know from the French film of the same name, also shown in our country/. The French doctor Ferron recommended military marches as a remedy against melancholy, asthenia and neuroses. At the end of the 19th century, the Parisian Dupre regularly hypnotized his patients suffering from various mental illnesses with the help of Chopin’s Mourning March from the Second Piano Sonata, and his colleague Sequin tried to educate the slow-developing children of Lyon with the music of Beethoven.
And here are some of the more serious studies, the work of researchers Shofer and Lacroix:
FOR NERVOUS AND MENTAL EXHAUST:
The poem for orchestra “Vltava” by Bedrzej Smetana and “Morning” by Edvard Grieg.
Gioachino Rossini’s overtures.
FOR DEPRESSIONS:
“Carnival” by Antonin Dvořák and Mozart’s serenades, Strauss’ waltzes
TO SUPPRESS THE FEELING OF ANGER:
Pilgrim’s Chorus from Wagner’s Tannhäuser
The Chorus of the Jews from Verdi’s Nabucco
IN MELANCHOLY:
Ode to Joy” and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony
FOR STRENGTHENING AFTER PROLONGED ILLNESS:
Mozart’s Piano Sonatas, Beethoven’s Pathetic Sonata, Dvořák’s Cello Concerto
FOR HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE:
Nocturne No. 5 by Frédéric Chopin, Beethoven’s Parsifal Overture
FOR CONCENTRATION OF ATTENTION AND MENTAL EXERCISE:
Some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s fugues
TONING THE NERVOUS SYSTEM:
Second Movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria, Claude Debussy’s Moonlight, Chopin’s Nocturne in D Minor, Bellini’s Melodies
AGAINST CHRONIC HEADACHE:
Mozart’s operas “Don Juan” and “The Marriage of Figaro”, George Gershwin’s Suite “An American in Paris”
FOR BIRTH PAIN RELIEF:
Music by Rossini, Ravel, Mozart and Haydn
The Swiss composer and doctor Sutermeister prescribed fast dances to patients with Parkinson’s disease and sclerosis of the limbs, and the French neurologist Kertan made successful attempts to treat asthenia patients with music by Handel, Scarlatti, Vivaldi and Beethoven.
In two words: MUSIC HEALS! Therefore, in Vienna, one of the world’s capitals of music, there is also an Institute of Melotherapy – for treatment with music.
But let’s emphasize strongly: not the low genres: rock, rap, disco, heavy metal, chalga, but the real, artistic or as we incorrectly call it “classical music” in our country, the music of the great and immortal masters. The other music – the one from the jungle with the screams, banging and high decibels can only make us sick, deafen us, irretrievably lose brain cells, raise our blood pressure, cause serious and permanent damage to the heart, stomach and other organs in Human body. This has long been scientifically proven. Unfortunately, young Bulgarians cannot understand it now, but this is another topic that requires separate attention.
AND WHAT SHOULD WE SAY ABOUT THE MUSIC AROUND US?
It is in much larger quantities, much more diverse, noisy, much more aggressive than it was in the past, in the homes of our grandparents, who lived peacefully without radio and television. Today, the aggression of music is, without a doubt, ubiquitous, total. The so-called “low genres” in it: pop, rock, disco, techno, folk, rap, etc., have directly occupied the Bulgarian electronic media – from the national to the neighborhood ones. And SEM keeps on giving licenses without control. And this unimaginable, often maddening noise and crash haunts us literally everywhere: at work, on the tram and the bus, in the cafe and the restaurant, in the store, on the market, on a holiday and in the city square/ it looked like a circus or a fair!/ . Especially annoying are the cars with external sound columns that pass through our streets and startle everything around. Such simpletons cannot be found anywhere in Europe, but here it is something normal and the police do not notice it at all.
For many of the young people, this “music” has become something like a “drug for the soul” and “sound addiction”. They are already dependent on her. Walk into any disco and you’ll see for yourself, if of course you can withstand the terrifying noise and rumble inside!…
The loud, rhythmic beats – not so sonorous! – strain and overwork the nervous system of adolescentsas a result, biochemical processes break down in their still unstrengthened organisms, leading to a number of adverse consequences, among which the gradual and permanent impairment of hearing, disturbances in nervous activity, in the heart, and in sleep are in the first place.
Unfortunately, the highly polluted sound and aesthetic environment in our country / Azis, Gloria, Misho Shamara, Rumanetsa and Enchev, Kondio, Ivana, Krisko, etc. – its polluters have no chet!/ is already a sad reality and as if no one is disturbed by it, we tolerate it as we tolerated the hateful and barbaric Turkish slavery. It is as if we are somewhere in the Orient or in the jungles of Africa, but not in the old and cultural Europe / we seem to be in it only geographically /. Even BNR /especially “Horizont”/ succumbed to this incredible “pop gigantomania”/ about which our great composer Marin Goleminov first raised the alarm years ago/ and it literally overwhelmed him. Indeed, there is hardly any other national radio in the world that is so staged and Americanized, in which the share of art music and Bulgarian performers and bands is so negligible. They are rare guests on the radio. For years now, BNR has not broadcast live even the regular concerts of its orchestra, as most national radios do. I listen to radio from many countries of Europe and the world / via the Internet I counted 682 radios for classical music from Chile to New Zealand!/ and I can say that ours is probably the most rootless, the most popularized and Americanized, and lately it has been stubbornly chalgize. Yes, Radio Sofia even dubs its broadcasts, supposedly, the cultural program “Hristo Botev” with ugly American “tupalki” / hits in the jargon of the radio presenters themselves, some of whom have long forgotten that there was Mozart, Schubert, Chopin and even Johann Strauss …/. Our radio is also the only one in the world that does not have a separate broadcast program for classical / art music, as even…Turkish and Peruvian have!
And it is known that only normal, low-decibel music heals and has a beneficial effect on the body and psyche – mainly artistic music, incorrectly called “classical” in the BNR. That is why there are also in the musical capital of Europe, Vienna a special institute for treatment through music or melotherapy – with music of the old masters, the classics and the romantics. Because it has been practically and scientifically proven that the works of Vivaldi and Handel, Mozart and Chopin, Beethoven, Rossini and Johann Strauss and a number of other authors heal, soothe and harmonize. And then why these wonderful, divine opuses of the great musicians do not sound more often on our electronic media, as is actually the case in the whole civilized world? Why does BNR play them little by little, mainly late at night, from 3 to 5 o’clock, and the rest of the time it fills our heads with fairy tales, endless text shows, topped with colorful American slobs and ads that can make you dumb! A real talking newspaper. The same can be said about the supposedly “national” and ambitious Radio Darik, where culture and art music are almost absent. And BTV started regularly blowing our heads with the lowest quality music even on March 3rd and New Year! In this television, that much music is simply “taboo”. You won’t even see a fragment of a performance there, even at our National Opera, which is already world-class, but there are extended reports about the gassing incident there. There is simply no place for culture. There is too much room for… the chalga, for Hollywood stupid actions, for football, for worldly gossip and intrigue, but not for the real values. For BTV and Nova, Mozart and Beethoven simply do not exist. There, every rocker and every newly hatched Hollywood star is a “legend”, the “top of the art”. There they advertise them as something “unique”, “incomparable”. The name of our famous opera singers such as Sonia Yoncheva, Krasimira Stoyanova, Alexandrina Pendachanska or Vladimir Stoyanov, virtuoso Svetlin Rusev or conductors with a world-class career Pavel Balev cannot be heard in these media. Ivo Venkov, Ivan Angelov. Nor the large-scale opera productions of director Plamen Kartalov. There, the chalga is the absolute queen in its various guises – rock, pop, techno, rap, as well as the oriental kuchek. That seems to be the aesthetic of the people working there.
And why not take our children regularly to the opera and concert, as is the case in Europe? Why are our music teachers unwilling to take the trouble /which requires no special effort!/ to take their students to some suitable performance of an opera, operetta, ballet or musical, a popular concert? And why not make these visits part of music curricula? The Ministry of Education and Science could do something about this. But for now, it publishes textbooks on singing and music, in which it presents in two sentences Mozart / was a “German” composer and “wrote symphonies”, – imagine only symphonies!/, along with…footballer Stoichkov/?!/, for who is given more space than the “Genius of Salzburg”!
The fact is that most of the young people in Bulgaria, the homeland of Orpheus and Boris Hristov, are already aesthetically illiterate, spiritually impoverished, with coarsened senses. And it is a fact that such a low cultural level never existed in Bulgaria, neither before 1944 nor after – until 1989. It is also a fact that this ugly music not only simplifies our children from an early age, but can awaken aggression and cruelty in some of them. Most Bulgarian students graduate from school without having entered the theater, the opera or the concert hall!
They know the songs with the cynical lyrics, as well as the biographies of Azis, Gloria, Crisco, Maria Ilieva and Micho Shamara, but they have not heard of Verdi, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, Haydn, Mozart or Puccini! And why is music not studied more and more seriously, as it is in most cultural countries of Europe? And maybe because Bulgarian education should be simplified – Europe will not need educated and cultured Bulgarians. It has already drained a lot of young brains from Bulgaria. But the state refuses. Neither the MES nor our Ministry of Culture are excited about this simplification. Minister Boyle Banov sends congratulatory letters to the rapper Krisko, who became famous for the closet lyrics of his songs, with which young people in our country are educated aesthetically / I apologize for the vocabulary!/.
And BNT decided to give its “contribution” to the simplification of young people with its new colorful show “Rock intermission”, instead of starting an educational column and opening to young people the wonderful and valuable world of great music.
Yes, let’s not forget that music heals, but it can also… kill. Let’s remember “Amnesia” and “Indigo”…
#Euterpa #heals #also…kill
