Have you ever ever turned to music when battling a troublesome emotion, like disappointment, nervousness or anger?
Most individuals consider that music has some therapeutic energy, and that confidence is more and more backed by empirical evidence. Nevertheless, there stays little consensus on exactly how or why music has a capability to affect our emotional, bodily and psychological well-being.
Since historical instances, physicians and philosophers have explored the facility of music in human life. Though the writings of Plato and Aristotle are extra well-known, one other historical faculty of philosophy, Stoicism, cultivated an curiosity in music’s therapeutic potential.
On condition that the phrase “stoic” is generally used to explain a inflexible, impassive particular person, Stoic musical practices would appear doomed to the boring or weird.
However Stoicism – the capital “S” type – is a faculty of thought that’s actually extra about managing turbulent feelings in on a regular basis life. This casts their connection to music in a unique mild, and it helps clarify how Stoicism positively formed the course of mental and music historical past.
Management what you may
Based in historical Athens and peaking in reputation in first century Rome, Stoicism was developed by philosophers like Seneca, Epictetus and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius to handle harmful feelings resembling nervousness, anger and grief by way of workout routines that shift perspective. The query of management varieties the core of this technique. The Stoics taught that it is just by recognizing and accepting what’s past an individual’s management that an individual can exert maximal management over what’s inside their energy.
Importantly, the Stoic method doesn’t search to immediately suppress dangerous feelings however focuses as an alternative on reshaping an individual’s worldview, in order that after they encounter issue or trauma, they are going to be ready to expertise feelings much less destructively.
This technique of placing issues in perspective could appear acquainted; the founders of cognitive behavioral remedy, one of the most popular forms of psychotherapy today, directly borrowed from Stoicism.
In recent times – and particularly for the reason that begin of the COVID-19 pandemic – curiosity in Stoicism has surged, with individuals from various political and financial backgrounds recognizing the efficacy of this historical system to handle afflictions like nervousness and habit.
In turbulent instances, Neostoicism emerges
So the place does music match into all of this?
As a historical musicologist, I’ve achieved extensive research on musical practices impressed by the revival of Stoicism in late-Sixteenth and Seventeenth-century France, a motion often known as Neostoicism.
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Rising within the wake of the violent French Wars of Religion, Neostoics regarded to Stoicism as a treatment for social and political instability. They developed a vocal music repertoire to show the ideas of the system, guiding singers and listeners to “rehearse” Stoic strategies of emotional regulation by way of casual musical gatherings in individuals’s properties.
These songs illustrated Stoic ideas by way of musical “text painting,” wherein particular phrases, actions or ideas have been musically conveyed by way of sound – and, typically, visuals – within the rating.
Take an instance from 1582 – “L’eau va viste,” a poem by Antoine de Chandieu that was set to music by Paschal de L’Estocart.
L’eau va viste en s’escoulant,
Plus viste le traict volant,
Et plus viste encore passe
Le vent qui les nues chasse.
Mais de la joye mondaine
La course est si tressoudaine,
Qu’elle passe encor devant
L’eau et le traict et le vent.
Water flows rapidly,
Even quicker the flying arrow,
And quicker nonetheless passes,
The wind which chases the clouds,
However of worldly pleasure,
Its course is so sudden,
That it passes even earlier than,
The water, the arrow, and the wind.
Quite a few Stoic writings, resembling Seneca’s “On the Brevity of Life,” evoke related imagery of working water to warn in opposition to inserting one’s happiness in exterior comforts and securities, which, like a present, rapidly cross.
L’Estocart’s musical association for “L’eau va viste” picks up on this high quality of movement. A snowballing rhythm good points momentum with every new instance of fast passing.
The river of time
Zoom forward virtually 4 centuries, and the English rock band Pink Floyd composed a strikingly related musical reflection of their iconic track “Time” from their 1973 album, “Dark Side of the Moon.”
The album outlines all the main forces and considerations that may drive individuals insane: growing older, loss of life, worry, greed and violence.
Psychological well being held specific salience for the band. Their founding frontman, Syd Barrett, had a mental breakdown only some years prior. Based on Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, the album is about “life with a heartbeat,” and the band alerts this by opening and shutting the album with a gradual, simulated heartbeat that sounds someway each mechanical and profoundly human.
The opening of ‘Darkish Aspect of the Moon’ options the beating of a coronary heart.
Creating this rhythmic symbolism additional, the only “Time” makes use of quite a few musical methods to attract consideration to the fragility of human life.
The monitor opens with a meandering two-and-a-half minute instrumental introduction, slowly constructing from a breathy synthesizer drone to the disorienting sound of quite a few ticking clocks. Then there’s a cacophony of alarms earlier than listeners hear a mechanical bass click on that feels like a metronome or a mechanical heartbeat.
In ‘Time,’ the opening chaos of sounds finally settles right into a groove.
The doorway of the electrical guitar and more and more common musical phrases lastly arrange the arrival of the vocals in the first verse: “Ticking away the moments that make up a boring day / fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand method.”
This uncommon prolonged instrumental introduction destabilizes a listener’s expectation of musical time and calls for higher consideration to the moment-by-moment sensations of its passing. The lyrics all through the track reinforce this preliminary musical warning –that listeners should pay shut consideration to the circulation of time and to ensure it’s used with objective and that means.
“The time is gone. The track is over,” the lyrics conclude, “Thought I’d one thing extra to say.”
An inside retailer of energy
These two musical examples, composed almost 400 years aside, mannequin a core aspect of Stoic remedy: By meditating on the fragility of time, Stoics search to not instill dread, however to disclose loss of life and transience as pure features of the human expertise that may be confronted with out nervousness. This calm acceptance presents a launch from harmful feelings like worry and craving that pull our consideration to the long run and the previous. As Marcus Aurelius recommended, “Give your self a present – the current second.”
Stoicism and its ample inventive echoes are simply misinterpret as pessimistic due to this relentless give attention to human mortality and fragility. This damaging studying misses Stoicism’s profoundly optimistic and empowering message, which is that our psychological freedom stays in our management, no matter our exterior circumstances.
Waters highlighted precisely this level in his protection of the humanism of “Darkish Aspect of the Moon,” explaining that “Regardless of the slightly miserable ending … there may be an allowance that every one issues are doable, that the potential is in our arms.”
Music, from this attitude, presents a method to be taught in regards to the therapeutic technique of the Stoics in a method that goes past the contemplation of philosophical lyrics. These examples – and plenty of others within the Stoic custom that so thoughtfully unite phrases and sounds – remodel useful Stoic recommendation right into a therapeutic observe guided by way of the twists and turns of track.
