“You are the music while the music lasts” – T. S. Eliot
In India we have at least a million people who are initiated to music in a formal way, of whom several thousand possess degrees and diplomas in musicology.
As music is used in India generally as a means for entertaining listeners, their role remains limited. While some of them work as teachers in a handful of institutions and universities, most of them end up as part time professionals depending on their luck and fate to make a hand to mouth existence.
It is in this context, the recent awakening of interests in music therapy all over India seems to give hope and sunshine to those musicians who are not in a position to profitably utilize their talents in the competitive world of musical entertainment.
Some of the recent experiments conducted in Lebenshilfe, an organization devoted to the mentally retarded in Visakhapatnam goes to show that people who have developed knowledge of music through studies and practices would prove as great assets in the lives of mentally retarded as their music, if selectively employed can bring out smiles the face of the depressed and severely retarded people as well.
A professional music group belonging to this organization was made to use some selected passages from the beta-ragas (such as Kadanakudhoohalam, Anandabhairavi and Faraj with an emphasis on joyful rhythms to find that most un-responding of the mentally retarded too show an inclination to those in a new confidence in the minds of the musicians that their talents would to just be wasted in entertaining the already entertained!
The parents of those special children present during the occasion also conveyed that their children have responded so well to musical pieces selected specially for them.
What is the secret of those musical pieces?
When we carefully look at those raga-tala combinations, we noticed that basically the sounds conveyed a sense of assertion – pleasant assertion, rather which had a ‘wake-up’ effect on the minds of the retarded children. Secondly the force with which the percussionists played their instruments (bongo, congo, tabla and mridangam) tried to capture the attention of those children with their ever-bearing dominance on them. While some children started moving their heads and limbs with the rhythms, a few of them who were very severely retarded opened up their eyes, looked here and there, waved their palms and hands and then went back to their original position of sleep!
The encouraging results brought in by those experiments are now replicated with more children so that a reliable statistical analysis could be made possible on the effect of music on the mentally challenged people. The children will be listening to 30 different Carnatic and Hindustani ragas and the observers and researchers will be recording the impact of those ragas in a detailed manner.
The idea is to shortlist those musical structures which can not only activate but also cheer – our thinking process to make us more productive and socially interactive.
This article was published in ‘AYURVEDA AND ALL’ Feb 2016 – Pages 28, 29
Edited by Geeta Shreedar, June 28, 2021