THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF MEDICAL RESONANCE THERAPY MUSIC®

The Historical Background of Medical Resonance Therapy Music®



PYTHAGORAS

Physician, musicologist,
mathematician, founder of our
scientific age
he created the preconditions for
utilising harmonically structured
music in medicine
The his­tory of Medi­cal Reso­nance Ther­apy Mu­sic® is an­cient – it be­gins at a time when art, re­lig­ion, and medi­cine still formed a unity.

That is why the old­est works of art or re­ligious and phi­loso­phi­cal writ­ings of man­kind re­port of the ef­fect of a kind of mu­sic which forms the soul, puts so­cial life in or­der, and heals man ho­lis­ti­cally.

Even prior to the be­gin­ning of our mod­ern cal­en­dar, in the sixth cen­tury BC, es­pe­cially the fa­mous phy­si­cian, mathe­ma­ti­cian, phi­losopher, mu­si­colo­gist and mu­si­cian respec­tively, Pythagoras, whom I have al­ready men­tioned sev­eral times, sup­ported the applica­tion of a kind of mu­sic which was struc­tured ac­cord­ing to the laws of har­mony of the mi­crocosm of mu­sic, and was to have a benefi­cial ef­fect on the life of the in­di­vid­ual in health as well as in har­mony with na­ture.

And the way in which this bril­liant scholar ap­proached this matter, fi­nally made him the foun­der of our sci­en­tific era.

At the time of Pythagoras, mu­sic had the very con­scious task of de­vel­op­ing man ethi­cally. All char­ac­ter­is­tics of this art were con­cen­trated on the ob­jec­tive to natu­rally put the in­ner life of the in­di­vid­ual hu­man be­ing in or­der, and to cul­ti­vate his soul to live with the crea­tor and his crea­tion in natu­ral har­mony – and in this way to also have a healthy in­ner self.

At that time, this prac­ti­cal task of mu­sic was si­mul­ta­ne­ously a reli­gious, ideo­logi­cal, ethi­cal and purely ar­tis­tic one.

Pythagoras now aroused in this ethi­cally shaped mu­si­cal work the idea of mod­ern sci­entific think­ing by start­ing to ob­jec­tiv­ise the mu­si­cal pa­rame­ters which had so far only been de­fined re­lig­iously, phi­loso­phi­cally or ar­tis­ti­cally – with meas­ure­ments and num­bers. He be­gan to meas­ure mu­sic and / or ele­ments of mu­sic in terms of mathe­mat­ics and phys­ics.

For the reli­gious, phi­loso­phi­cal, ethi­cal and ar­tis­tic lead­ers of that time, this was an enor­mously revo­lu­tion­ary act which threat­ened to turn their pre­vious con­cep­tion of the world upside down – and so it was not a co­in­ci­dence that Pythagoras got caught in an in­creas­ing whirl­pool of reli­gious, po­liti­cal, phi­loso­phi­cal and ar­tis­tic dis­pute and fi­nally even in ideo­logi­cal per­se­cu­tion – for which, with the help of musi­co­logi­cal re­search and the help of phys­ics and mathe­mat­ics, he pre­pared to cap­ture the men­tioned ar­eas of life: re­lig­ion, ethics, phi­loso­phy and art in an exact knowl­edge of sci­entific char­ac­ter, and to thereby demys­tify them – which, of course, was also linked to a loss of the pre­vious power that the con­tem­po­rary lead­ers of so­cial life had.

Pythagoras had veri­fied the natu­ral point of con­tact of crea­tion be­tween the sub­jec­tive and ob­jec­tive world in the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic: be­tween our in­ner world with our reli­gious, ethi­cal, moral, phi­loso­phi­cal and ideo­logi­cal ideas, but also with our talent, with our innate in­ner traits and abili­ties on one hand – and the ra­tional world of mathe­mat­ics, phys­ics, chem­is­try and bi­ol­ogy as well as as­tron­omy on the other hand.

And he wanted to use this mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic to firmly weld to­gether the outer and in­ner world of man as well as the sci­ences natu­rally re­sult­ing from this.

And in his fa­mous school for the train­ing of young phy­si­cians, sci­en­tists and art­ists he there­fore logi­cally taught on one hand:

  1. the in­tui­tive spon­ta­ne­ous in­ner re­ali­sa­tion of the natu­ral laws of har­mony of the crea­tor in the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic of the in­ner men­tal imagi­na­tive space, mean­ing in the area of mu­si­cal in­tui­tion or mu­si­cal crea­tive think­ing and feel­ing, as well as on the other hand

  2. the outer em­piri­cal: the sci­en­tific re­ali­sa­tion of the natu­ral laws of har­mony of the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic with the help of his fa­mous “Mono­chord”, the mathema­tical and physi­cal in­ves­ti­ga­tion of the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic and its har­moni­cal con­nec­tion to other sci­en­tific fields of knowl­edge such as medi­cine, bi­ol­ogy, phys­ics and as­tron­omy

This com­plex re­search and teach­ing work of Pythagoras was di­rected be­yond the as­pect of health at the re­ali­sa­tion of a stan­dard­ised field of life and crea­tion, and there­fore at the de­vel­op­ment of a uni­fied field the­ory, some­thing our mod­ern sci­ence also strives for – but con­trary to this, Pythagoras, at the same time, in­cluded the great ar­eas of re­lig­ion, ethics, psy­chol­ogy, so­ci­ol­ogy and art, as well as medi­cine in this whole proc­ess of in­te­grated, sub­jec­tive and ob­jec­tive achieve­ment of knowl­edge:

so he com­bined the arts’ in­tui­tive and the sci­en­tific ob­jec­tive veri­fy­ing achieve­ment of re­ali­sa­tion with each other, in or­der to ad­vance to a ho­lis­tic, stan­dard­ised view of the in­ner and outer world, shaped by natu­ral har­mony.

On this in­te­grated basis, he wanted to ensure the ho­lis­tic sys­tem­ati­cal de­vel­op­ment of natu­ral hu­man dig­nity and the pro­tec­tion of life as well as the ecol­ogy.


Excerpt from:

Peter Hübner
Na­ture’s Laws of Har­mony in the Mi­cro­cosm of Mu­sic

From a lec­ture given by the clas­si­cal com­poser at the medi­cal fac­ulty of the Uni­ver­sity of Hei­del­berg, the Uni­ver­sity of Tel Aviv and the Uni­ver­sity of Mag­de­burg, and the talks which fol­lowed on the ap­pli­ca­tion of the natu­ral laws of har­mony in the mi­cro­cosm of mu­sic for medi­cine.