Customer Reviews

Music: The New Age Elixir

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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.

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.

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).

At the time this book was published in 1996, Lisa Summer was "a board-certified, registered music therapist who teaches at Anna Maria College... where she is an associate professor and the Director of Music Therapy. She is also the Coordinator of Guided Imagery and Music Programs at The Bonny Foundation."

Here are some quotations from her book:

"These practitioners, best described as New Age music healers, have created amongst themselves a philosophy which lacks clarity and logic. It has grown out of myths and legends, converted into 'facts' in a parody of how science progresses. The foundations and axioms of New Age music healing are based upon wishes and fantasies which the practitioners in the field have agreed, perhaps unwittingly, to believe are facts. This agreement is protected by the apparent good intentions of the music healers. Because they wish to heal people, it appears mean-spirited to attack the foundations of their craft." (Pg. 7)
"The vast majority of New Age music healing philosophy is fatally flawed by the oversimplification of complex psychological, physiological, acoustical, and musical phenomena." (Pg. 9)
"When the music therapist expresses an abstract idea, the New Age music theorist often misunderstands the abstraction as having taken place, much in the way that the New Age in general has latched on to the 'Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon' as actual fact, rather than as the metaphor that (Lyell) Watson invented." (Pg. 16)
"(Steven) Halpern's positions oscillate endlessly. He writes his music intuitively; no, he writes it based on scientific experiments. There is a specific human harmonic; there are many individual frequencies for each organ. In one book Halpern attacked Muzak but in one lecture he even went so far as to refer to his work as a kind of Muzak. This condition of constant wavering is not Halpern's alone. He shares it with many of his brethren." (Pg. 237)
"Sound Health: The Music and Sounds That Make Us Whole by Steven Halpern and Louis Savery overflows with testimonials... pages of self-serving commentary on the perfection of Steven Halpern's own music... lengthy encomiums to Halpern's Spectrum Suite, a tape that Halpern assures us is a hundred times more relaxing than the most relaxing classical music, according to his scientific testing. His perseverative salesmanship for 'Spectrum Suite' is of the most frantic sort imaginable... Halpern's testimonials affirm that anything is possible for him, including raising the dead to exalt Halpern's name." (Pg. 264-265)

Lisa Sumner falls into the same pattern she criticizes in her book. She has not read much beyond 1992 in the field of mind/body medicine. She rightfully points out some of the sloppy thinking of new agers. But her logic is as faulty as theirs and just incorrect. Her lack ofrespect for those devoted to the field actually backfires against her goal. The book neither teaches nor inspires. It is unprofessional and does not reflect well on Music Therapy.