Music Therapy: Can It Help Anyone?

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

after WWI and WWII when musicians would go to the Veteran's hospitals around the country to play for the thousands suffering from the emotional and the physical trauma of the wars. There were notable responses in many of the patients, which led the hospitals to hire musicians to play all the time. It was soon clear that the hospital musicians needed training before entering the facility and the demand grew for college curriculum. So in 1944 Michigan State University set up the first music therapy degree program in the country.
The thing about music therapy that people have to be careful with is that you need specific kinds of music to get different desired results. Samuel D. Uretsky says "the benefits of music are fairly obvious--it's comparatively inexpensive, and it can be reused over and over. That assumes that you pick the right music. Handel's "Water Music" can be used again and again; "Achey Breaky Heart" (by Billy Ray Cyrus) causes severe gastrointestinal distress ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

is "the body's ability to synchronize its rhythms with the rhythms of vibrating bodies around it. (Hoffman, 2) This is one reason that music affects us physiologically. She explains, for example, that babies in the neonatal unit are known to match their heart rhythms with the monitor beeps around them, speeding up and slowing down as it does. To me the transpersonal response would have to be the strangest. I don't think that many people would be willing, or able to do this. Ms. Hoffman says that these patients actually have a "spiritual" or "mystical" experience. They talk of an altered state of consciousness while listening to certain music, where they imagine they become something ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: