Music and health

“Musical instruments are aids to the maintenance of health, and to the restoration of health once lost, according to the difference in the complexions of men. For this art of music was anciently ordained to draw the mind back into healthful habits, and thus doctors are dedicated to its use to cure bodies. Therefore they employ tones for the sick mind, just as they do medicines for the sick body.”

– Ibn Butlan, ninth-century Iraqui physician

Cited in: Inge Kjemtrup, “The power of music therapy”, Pianist, Issue 59, April-May 2011. Warners Group Publications, p.66.

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Write over improvise
If Heaven has bestowed on you a fine imagination, you will often be seated at your piano in solitary hours, as if attached to it; you will desire to express the feelings of your heart in harmony, and the more clouded the sphere of harmony may perhaps be to you, the more mysteriously you will […]
The Queen Stands at Your Right Hand – Psalm 64 (65)
Title: The Queen Stands At Your Right Hand Text: Psalm 44 (45): 10-12. 16 Composer: Greg Smith Instrumentation: SATB and piano Product medium: PDF score and part     Related products:     – The Queen Stands At Your Right Hand – Piano solo (mp3 recording)     – The Queen Stands At Your Right Hand – Piano (score) Sample:
Two hands or one
American pianist Seymour Lipkin, a student of Rudolf Serkin recalled a performance of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata Back in the 1970s I gave a recital at Curtis at Mr. Serkin’s invitation.  I was playing the Hammerklavier in those years.  Why, in my right mind … I should never have … but I did.  There, sitting in […]
Sacred
Numbering of psalms. Different translations of the psalms have been used. For consistency, the psalms are labelled by the Hebrew numbering first, followed by the Greek number in parenthesis.
That’s a wrap
Electronic music composer Jeff Bryant never imagined that learning to knit would be part of his graduate coursework at California Institute of the Arts. But when his interface design instructor challenged him to build a non-boring MIDI controller device last fall, Bryant found an unlikely musical ally: red yarn. By weaving conductive thread into the […]
Perseverance
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Believe in Luck
“I am a great believer in luck and the harder I work the more of it I have.”— Stephen Leacock, Canadian author American Opinion, volume 2, issues 8-11, page 20
Schumann on Chopin’s style
Chopin can hardly write anything now but that we feel like calling out in the seventh or eighth measure, “It is by him!” – Robert Schumann, 1838 P. Kildea, Chopin’s Piano, London, Allen Lane, 2018, p. 43.
A bewitched recording
Early phonograph recordings were a little rough.  In 1889, pianist Hans von Bülow was asked to play into a phonograph in America: After playing upon a pianoforte, from which issued sounds compared to the soft and dreamy gurgle of a brook, the far-off sighign of the night wind and the roar of the cataract, he […]
Music is richer than words
“If I could express the same thing with words as with music, I would, of course, use a verbal expression. Music is something autonomous and much richer. Music begins where the possibilities of language end. That is why I write music.” Jean Sibelius, in an interview with Berlingske Tidende, 10th June 1919. Cited at: www.sibelius.fi […]