by Islene Runningdeer (Music 781.11 Run)
Author Runningdeer has a diverse
background that has informed her work with music as medicine, which she
describes in the first few chapters of the book. After high school, she
attended two music schools, although she had to leave her senior year to be a
stay-at-home mom and wife. Ultimately she returned to school, graduating from
the University of Vermont with a Masters of Education through a unique multidisciplinary
program they offer, combining education, medical, counseling, and music
disciplines. Runningdeer’s work combines this background, which in many ways
approximates a traditional academic music therapy path, with her experiences
with indigenous traditional music healing practices from ancient Egyptian,
Native American, French, and East Indian origins. Her primary focus is using
musical healing practices with elderly populations, including care for dementia
and palliative care situations.
After this introduction to her own
unique life path, Runningdeer introduces us to some of the core traditions she
draws from throughout the rest of Part One, starting with ancient Egyptian
concepts. Although we have lost the music of ancient Egypt to time, we still have
the words from many hymns and the framework of many rituals that were performed
in their temples. Runningdeer takes us through the life of a “shemayet,” or
temple musician, which had some overlaps with ancient medicine practices. This
is followed by a chapter on healing practices from the Seneca tribe ancestors
of Runningdeer, where again we find that healing practices combined song,
dancing, and plants in ceremonial settings. Next, we move to 11th-Century
France, and focus particularly on their equivalent of hospice care, which
included song and prayer at the deathbed of Benedictine monks. And finally we
arrive in modern-day India, where the ancient practice of Raga Chikitsa, or
Raga Therapy, continues to be part of a broader system of Ayurveda, the holistic
Indian approach to medicine. While each of these approaches is unique, they all
share many commonalities across geography and time.
In Part Two, “Techniques and
Illuminations,” Runningdeer starts breaking down her particular approach to
healing music (which she refers to as a form of “Energy Medicine” in the
introduction to this section). The first area of focus she addresses is
breathing, in which she explains how she has adapted the yogic pranayama
technique of deep breathing for her work, pointing out that musicians focus on
their breathing to perform better, and that the phrasing of music has its own
breath-like patterns. In working with palliative care patients, she is able to
practice deep breathing near them, which often helps their own breathing to
relax.
Next, she addresses the heart—not
the organ, necessarily, but the idea of expressing a generous, compassionate
heart when working with music therapy practices. In this sense, the heart
embodies the act of giving, and sharing music with a person in a vulnerable
state is more successful with this kind of mindset. She carries this concept
into the idea of “the magic of willful intention,” or focusing your work
through the power of intention. The deep breathing and a generous heart help
contribute to willful intention, creating a state of compassionate care.
To close out the book, Runningdeer
discusses her sense that she has “helpers” that work with her during music
therapy sessions, and various interpretations of this idea found in spiritual
practices worldwide. Then she discusses the effects of this work with the main
two populations that she serves. Through palliative or hospice care, she is
able to help clients transition more gently. While working with dementia
patients, her audiences are more energized, alert and lucid after her visits,
sometimes remembering the words to songs from their own distant histories and
even breaking into dance. Runningdeer discusses some of her musical selections
for dementia patient performances (usually classical music and vintage songs),
as well as some ideas she uses for songs to be sung near death (often hymns
with references to grand rivers).
All told, it’s a fascinating look
into one successful practitioner’s means and methods toward the use of music as
a kind of medicine. For this reader, I found Musician Healer to be a fairly even-handed look at
practices that sometimes fall outside of the boundaries of modern medicine,
with a minimum of “woo woo,” as the author calls it. There was one factual
inaccuracy that I noticed in the section on Raga music in India, a reference to
Raga Kausi Kanhara as performed by sitarist Ravi Shankar being centered around
a C# pitch that’s 432 Hz, or the “Ohm frequency,” but in fact 432 Hz is a
detuned concert A pitch around which there has been a lot of controversy in the
last decade. Other than that, I found the information presented here to be
pretty solid and of a nature that’s not overly mystical for the average musical
reader.
(If you enjoy this, you may also
wish to try Healing Songs by Ted Giola or Waking the Spirit: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind and
Soul by Andrew Schulman.)
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
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