Music: The New Age Elixir [Hardcover]

Lisa Summer (Author), Joseph Summer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1996

Capitalising on the growing search for alternative realities, New Age music healers have emerged. These healers comprise a disparate group ranging from composers who believe their music can cure cancer to researchers who think flowers should be the arbiters of our musical taste. Because science has been reluctant to confront the ambiguities inherent in music, many of the assertions made by music healers have not been scientifically examined. The lack of definition in music has proved to be a fertile field for deception and misrepresentation. In this book Lisa Summer confronts these groundless claims head-on, revealing the vacuous reasoning behind New Age music healing. Her critique is hard hitting but humorous, offering examples from many cultures and musical periods. Making use of the music healers' own erroneous thinking, this book debunks current fads while enlightening readers to the real power of music.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Far more skeptical is Music: The New Age Elixir, in which Lisa Summer (who teaches music therapy at Anna Maria College), with Joseph Summer, energetically debunks the claims of certain New Age figures to heal through sound and music.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Music can stir the emotions and help change thinking patterns, and 'new age' healers have learned to use music in therapeutic settings. Author Summer is herself a music therapy director who takes a critical approach to music therapy applications and contentions. Fads are attacked, music healing techniques analyzed, and musical examples from diverse cultures used to examine the real impact of music on the psyche. -- Midwest Book Review

Product Details

• Hardcover: 303 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books; 1ST edition (November 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573921041
• ISBN-13: 978-1573921046
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,550,961 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fine critique of a pernicious misuse of music., October 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Music: The New Age Elixir (Hardcover)

Summer takes on the vacuities and self-serving bombast of the so-called "sound healers." These folk are perpetrating a unique and dreadful double-header: bad science AND bad music. Summer uses their own claims and assertions, and by applying logic, clear thinking and analytical insight, demonstrates the emptiness of this pseudo-discipline and its practitioners. While often funny, her justifiable exasperation at their claims and beliefs leads her into occasional splenetic venting which sometimes mitigates the book's impact; methinks the lady doth protest too much. But then the next page brings a fresh "sound healing" inanity and I'm cheering her on again. Well worth your while -- and if you know a gullible person who's been sucked in by these particular scams, a good way to reintroduce a most valuable virtue: skepticism.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Tell us something we don't know, July 9, 2005

By 

Leroy Banjo - See all my reviews

This review is from: Music: The New Age Elixir (Hardcover)

Ms Summer is in high dudgeon. The New Agers are intruding on her own turf, the almost-equally vapid field of music therapy. Although "Music: The New Age Elixir" is somewhat useful as a catalog and history of the last hundred years of western music shamanism, it comes across primarily as an opinion piece that condemns the fuzzy double-talk of Steven Halpern (et. al.) as being, well, fuzzy double-talk. This we already know.

Do we need a book that "exposes" the illogic and silliness of composers (or channellers) that claim to heal physical maladies through their music? If we do, let it be more than Ms Summer's circumlocutory screed, and god save us from her attempts at humor. (Ms Summer's big joke: music channelled from dead composers is bad because since their deaths they have been "decomposing.")

Intent on excoriating the claims of the New Agers, she blinds herself to their only legitimacy: Some New Age muzak actually _is_ relaxing and calming. It "heals", in much the same way as a shot of whisky in a quiet room. Yes, Mr. Halpern and Mr. McClellan are full of hot air; yet, while their products could never be mistaken for real music (or real medicine), they're not offensive or irritating -- as long as you don't pay attention to them, and as long as you don't have a Master of Music Therapy chip on your shoulder. A much more interesting book, and one that would better serve Ms. Summer's agenda, would be an investigation of those folks who claim to have been "cured" by the Halpern opera.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The real value of music, November 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Music: The New Age Elixir (Hardcover)

A witty, well-informed and devastating attack on the delusions and frauds of those who have hailed music as everything from a cure for AIDS or cancer to a tonic for petunias. Summer, a music therapist herself, writes out of a tangible commitment to the real therapeutic and insirational value of music, and shows a sophisticated technical knowledge of music (and a grip of elementary logic)which is far beyond that of those she criticizes, notwithstanding their pseudo-scientific pretensions. Those she criticizes ought to blush and hide their heads in shame (but they won't of course: they'll just ignore her and carry on extracting large sums of money from those less well-informed and astute).