A friend of mine recommended a new book on music as medicine called I Heard There Was a Secret Chord — which is a line from the iconic song “Hallelujah.” Daniel J. Levitin, neuroscientist and musician, explores the curative powers of music and its effects on the brain.
I’d be surprised if you’ve never heard the Leonard Cohen tune since countless versions have been recorded. My favorite is still this rendition by KD Lang, performed before the song gained huge popularity:
Did you hear the chord progression spoken of in the lyrics? It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth / The minor falls, the major lifts… Perhaps this sequence impacts us in wordless ways.
Cohen once said this about the meaning of “Hallelujah”:
This world is full of conflicts…,but there are moments when we can transcend the dualistic system and reconcile and embrace the whole mess and that’s what I mean by Hallelujah. That regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and you throw open your arms and you embrace the thing and you just say ‘Hallelujah! Blessed is the name.’ And you can’t reconcile it in any other way except in that position of total surrender, total affirmation.
Levitin celebrates the secret chord in his own way. He’s spent decades in neurological research, compiling studies to show how trauma, movement disorders, anxiety, depression, and Alzheimer’s have been improved by music. He helped Joni Mitchell recover from her brain aneurysm in 2015 by suggesting her nurses play a CD of her favorite artists, one that Joni compiled years earlier for Starbucks “Artists Choice” series.
Whether a secret chord brings healing through science or reconciliation through surrender, the result is the same.
The question is, what’s yours? In your own way, you can discover your secret chord.
That is living as music.
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Comments:
I love this Emma. Thank you for sharing the words Leonard spoke about the song. In Psychosynthesis, a perspective and practice is known as Both And... - of course similar to our shared experience of Improv Theatre's Yes, And... holding multiple truths at once, and yes, in the state of surrender, especially surrender to any attachment to a specific outcome. I find it a helpful practice especially in these times the world is facing. This also reminds me of a Pete Townsend song The Who recorded - it's on the Remastered CD of Who's Next - Pure And Easy. Roger Daltry sings, "There once was a note, pure and easy, playing so free like a breath rippling by." He goes on to sing, "We all find success when we all find our own dreams, and our love is enough to knock down any walls. And the future's been seen and men try to realize the simple secret in the note in us all." May we all hear a secret chord and find the note in us all. Tim VN
Beautiful Townsend lyrics, Tim! Thank you for sharing them. Tuning in to that note is the one practice itself, isn’t it.🎶