When music could be a miracle

He recognized me in­stantly. I had raked my memory but found no trace of him—a gaunt old man, tooth­less and graying in the skin, squinting rheumy eyes under thick tinted glasses, flailing tentative limbs, swaying as he walked with a cane, and held in place only when seated. As he began painfully in my sight to slip into a stupor, sheets of paper with song lyrics started to fly around. In a moment, as if on cue, Martina, our host, belted out the first phrase of an Ilokano serenade.

Group singing like back in high school, so our reunion in Waialua, Oahu, Hawaii, would turn out, I had thought, per­haps to uplift him. But rowdy together would be more like it, as no karaoke seemed around to keep us in beat and tune. And then, as if tugged by mar­ionette strings, he stood up, gesturing as he took over the harana Martina started, with brilliant notes no matter from failing lungs. So perfect in pitch that when I attempted to harmonize with a tercera (third voice), he stopped and point­ing a finger at me, in place of a baton, he said, “disintunado ka!”

‘Twas then that I remem­bered him, Felix, the boy with patrician looks, who sang solo on Monday flag ceremonies. Apparently undergoing di­alysis, this former music and math teacher—a clue to an ex­ceptional mind—had admitted to having wallowed in alcohol; he’s been on mere mainte­nance therapy for months, his family having been advised to expect an irreversible decline. Yet, every other week, accord­ing to Martina, he would turn up, rousing any small crowd to sing with him—the only pulse or clue that he still lived.

But such power has since been validated by medical re­search, so much so that today, not only musicians perform in patient’s wards, even in treatment rooms like infusion suites, a music therapist has become a regular. Increasingly known is its effect on patients suffering from clinical depres­sion and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which has since caused suicide among war re­turnees, and recently, among autistic children; all these add­ed to its already accepted po­tent force on the elderly fast slipping into the limbo of Alz­heimer’s Disease.

An item at Care2Causes a few years ago, citing a study presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, California, drawn from a four-month test period in an elderly care home, noted dra­matic changes in cognitive fac­ulty among the subjects with music; consider these, a glint in the eyes that seemed stoned, a tying up of words where these have been wind-flown, and tentative hands pointing to the time in a clock—signs of wak­ing up from a deep sleep with eyes open.

I’ve been witness to mem­ories turned blob revived by mere songs, even if only mo­mentary, among clients of then Marpole Place’s Elderly Day Care—a number of them quadriplegic, some seemingly lifeless, or caught up forever in a single emotion reflected in the eyes—during celebrations, like Remembrance Day, which marks D-Day, a victorious mo­ment in their youth. At the first strains of “Lilli Marlene,” ren­dered in raspy throaty voice a la Marlene Dietrich, by a spright­ly woman of their generation, like magic, would rouse them singing, humming, and sway­ing, the men obviously trans­ported to camps, where dark­ness gaped like jaws, and the women wistful with longing for a long-ago romance.

Even more powerful for me have been revelations be­hind some undying music, two in particular. Did you know that Ludwig van Beethoven had turned deaf by the time he composed his Ninth Sympho­ny with its “Ode to Joy?” As his hearing waned, apparently, so did the ode birth a furious storm in him; compelled to write it down, he used a met­ronome and hacked the legs of his piano to feel the notes vi­brate. The symphony remains his greatest to many like me, and why not? In both the or­chestra (composed of 100 in­struments, all invented to im­itate the human voice) and 100 live voices for the chorus, the absolutes in music cannot but transport one to the spheres.

For the late Maestro Lucio San Pedro, loneliness during his studies in compo­sition at the Juilliard School of Music in New York could have manacled him to sail back home without finishing his course. But as he revealed in an interview with me, the breeze, the streams, the birds of his beloved Angono, sus­tained him. And one day, these turned into a hum as if to salve his nostalgia, gradu­ally gathering, then calming into the lullaby, “Ugoy ng Duyan”—as Filipinos know, already a hymn among ex­patriates, who claim to feel swaddled, upon hearing its strings.

But back to our reunion; during the lunch break, Felix slipped into a stupor—“more often these days,” said Marti­na. I had asked, when or what he eats. According to her, he would take only a spoonful, and a sip of anything that hinted at alcohol for which he’d beg; “I think he feeds only on music,” Martina said. True enough, coming out of that brief sleep, he wailed through another love song.