Music at any age and stage of human life is a boon. But researchers at Yale University have found it to be a still greater boon in old age. The medical journal Lancet recently carried an exhaustive study on the benefits of music in old age. Music has the potential to drive away “old age blues” experienced by almost all senior citizens. The study urges senior citizens to listen to music of their taste, and exhorts them to play a musical instrument if they know how to play it.
The great novelist and raconteur William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), a medical doctor who never practised medicine, learnt to play the violin in order to tide over his loneliness in old age: he lived close to a century. Bertrand Russell would regularly listen to Beethoven’s ethereal symphonies to fight his sporadic schizophrenic bouts. He too had a long but highly productive existence on earth. He died at the age of 98 (1872-1970). The Victorian English poet Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) started playing the piano at 70 when he felt that his poetic prowess was deserting him. He got that back, thanks to taking to the piano.
The glial cells and neurons in the human brain tend to relate to the cadences of music known as ‘neural dance’ in the parlance of neuro-biology. That is why many old-age homes and hospitals in the west have trained musicians and a room meant for playing slow and lilting music.
Sigmund Freud would always advise his old patients to listen to Sebastian Bach’s minor and major compositions as they have a proven quality to make geriatric patients feel euphoric for a long time.
Contrary to the general belief that the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb disliked music and banned it in his kingdom, the Mughal court chronicler Khafif Khan mentioned in his court dispatches written in Persian that Aurangzeb’s chronic insomnia at the age of 78 was cured by the court musician Ahmad Rasool Khan. He would play a three-stringed modern sarangi type instrument called wazaaf in Persian to make the emperor sleep, and sing khayal as he was a trained vocalist as well. Aurangzeb gave away 14 villages near Badayun in what is today Uttar Pradesh as a gift to the gifted musician who brought sleep for the emperor. Aurangzeb died at the age of 89.
Helping you forget
Brain is forever in an agitated state during old age and also suffers from unwanted nostalgic memories. Music helps acquire selective amnesia and works miraculously to forget (unpleasant) memories that keep rankling. It’s known in medical parlance as ‘musical lobotomy of memory’, or MLM.
Frayed nerves in old age are rejuvenated when music is played. William Shakespeare termed old age the “second childhood”. Researchers such as Statham and Barnes have noticed that the inmates of old age homes often quarrel like children and it has nothing to do with maturity or the lack of it. The degeneration of cells and the weakening of the neuro-responsive system could be the reason for this child-like behaviour among old people living with a group of similar people. Here comes music to their rescue and it amazingly gives them a sense of bonhomie and a new-found maturity, which is called ‘MM’ or ‘musical maturity’.
Old-age homes in the U.S. and the U.K. insist that their inmates listen to a session of vocal and instrumental music. It helps them stay calm and mature! Yehudi Menuhin and Italian virtuoso Massimo Quarta was ever ready to play the violin for old and disabled people.
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