Unit 2 Blog Post

How powerful is music as a language or a bridge between reality and imagination?

I suppose the short answer is "really really really powerful. But then the next question is why? What makes music different?

I volunteered at Ability First in high school while I was living in LA. I was perhaps only 13 when Sami [not his real name] came in.

Sami was five years old, non-verbal and severely autistic due to a lack of intervention. He would fecal smear, take electronics apart almost instantly, and required 24/7 care. We found out pretty quickly, that Sami loved playing the piano. And so we pulled out the terrible cheap keyboard and let him go at it.

Within three months, he was beginning to sing song lyrics. He was still nonverbal, but he would occasionally belt out several lines of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Mary Had a Little Lamb.

On his 6th birthday, there was a birthday party for him in which we stuck some LED stars on the ceiling. Sami pointed up at the little lights, and very clearly enunciated, "twinkle twinkle."

I was stunned because our non-verbal kid just became verbal. Sami finding his voice through music was our bridge to reaching him. Today, he is twelve, and he is fully verbal. He writes his own pieces for piano and enjoys singing about mundane things, like the chair being blue, or that he had popcorn for lunch, but he is fully communicating and we're really proud of him.

In the readings that were assigned in comparative lit, we had a couple of characters be absolutely "changed" or "entranced" by music. Sonny from Sonny's Blues used music as his drug, his coping mechanism. Sonny struggled to find himself and to get other people to take him seriously. A huge recurring theme is when Sonny just constantly finds himself misunderstood, except in his music world.

Schwann, when listening to the sonata, is also transported away by the music to his lover, Odette. Both of these characters demonstrate the immense power of music, and music's ability to change any situation at will.