Music Will Save Us All
July 5, 2012 Blog Daniel Swanson
That’ll do for attention grabbing headlines me thinks… For those who have seen ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ one scene that sticks out above most is when the warden’s office is breached and the music from an Italian opera rings throughout the prison bringing, what is to the officers, unwanted and unparalleled order – it essentially brought a sense of freedom to the incarcerated men.
But in practice, what actual forms of musical rehabilitation are available? And how effective are they?
Music in Prisons: The Irene Taylor Trust is an independent charity that delivers weeklong projects where prisoners are encouraged to write and perform their own music with the assistance of experienced musicians. They recently reached a milestone with their first gig with a group of ex-inmates, showing that the continuation of music on the outside is a possibility and that it can have real positive outcomes in their reintegration back into society.
Much can be glamorised in such rehabilitative schemes, like we have seen with Gordon Ramsay’s latest program, where the advertisement showed him patronisingly telling a group of criminals to make fairy cakes. Contrastingly, Johnny Cash’s work around prisons, although nowhere near as demeaning, is often over romanticised considering he never served a sentence and made a lot of money from his live albums in prisons.
The point is that music, as an entity, is on a level of which we can all relate. It has a universal quality, of which Bobby McFerrin displays excellently at the World Science Festival in 2009 (really worth watching). As an avid songwriter myself, I appreciate the expressive outlet it provides, the sense of hope and possibility it brings and the way you can articulate emotions that do not always feel possible otherwise.
If there was one argument for the encouraged participation in music not just as a rehabilitative scheme but right across society, it is in Robert Gupta’s TED talk: Music is medicine, music is sanity. He narrates the story of a schizophrenic, who comes to sanity through his personal and mutual understanding of music.
So learn an instrument, make lyrics up in your head, or at the very least sing in the shower. You can never underestimate music’s value to your very being.
