We all knew music was good for us, but did we know Mozart was best? Arminta Wallace meets a man who advocates the composer's medical, motivational and educational merits
Music is good for us. Few people would quibble with that statement - unless, perhaps, they came across it while being force-fed The Corrs, Strauss waltzes or Julio Iglesias's greatest hits in a supermarket queue. But according to the US educationalist and composer Don Campbell, one kind of music is better for us than any other: Mozart's.
Got a migraine? Try Piano Concerto No 12 In A Major. Stressed? Take nine minutes of the andante from the String Quartet In E Flat, K 428. Need a boost? The allegro from the Third Violin Concerto will "charge your brain".
OK, it's not quite that simple. But Campbell, author of The Mozart Effect, is messianic in his conviction that music, particularly Mozart's, can produce positive and, more to the point, measurable results in all sorts of situations. These range from the fairly straightforward use of music to make you feel better to the rather more specialised use of particular pieces to improve memory and awareness; from the therapeutic application of music to help those with mental and physical disabilities to the auditory stimulation of newborns and young children for linguistic, emotional and physical development.
On a brief visit to Dublin recently, Campbell gave a bravura three-hour seminar on music as a teaching aid. It encompassed everything from rap spelling games through rhythmic French lessons to the way a simple metronome can be a "miracle tool" to help children with reading difficulties. Given his audience - a group of Montessori teachers - most of the ideas were aimed at the classroom, but Campbell isn't a man to restrain himself. He slipped in references to music's power to heal ("healing is not about cure, it's about balance - and so is music") and to music as a study aid for teenagers ("I'm not taking kids and saying: 'Well, here's a symphony; you should like this, it's going to make you smart.' I'll say: 'Listen to this music for seven minutes before you study. Try it. Are you willing to try something that will make your study easier? It's up to you.' "). There's even a series of masterclasses he has been running for classical concert-goers.
"We don't teach children to listen," he says after the seminar. "We teach reading and writing and even speaking - but not listening. Listening is not hearing."
Adults need to learn to listen, too, he says. "The symphonies in America are in terrible shape, because they have never provided audiences with any psychological tools for listening. They give you the history of the composer and the facts and figures about the piece and all that stuff. But they don't give audiences room to breathe. Music is about mind and body and spirit, not just about sitting there."
Campbell studied piano from the age of 13 with the legendary teacher Nadia Boulanger in Paris - and it was she, he insists, who informed his attitude to music. She also inspired his first book, in the form of a biography. But it was when, at the age of 45, doctors discovered a potentially fatal blood clot in his brain that Campbell realised music could be a lifesaver. "I nearly died," he says. "They were going to remove this part of my skull" - he indicates the front half of his head - "and I would have lost my eye. I said to myself, if I come through this I'm going to write both the antidote and the research."
He describes his illness, and his subsequent self-cure through a combination of vibration and visualisation, in The Mozart Effect. He also answers the question: why Mozart? Why not Beethoven, or Bach, or The Beatles? According to Campbell, it was a French doctor called Alfred Tomatis who, in the 1950s, pioneered research into the effects of Mozart's music, claiming it calmed listeners, improved spatial perception and allowed people to express themselves more clearly, regardless of musical taste or previous exposure to the composer's works. Tomatis went so far as to say that the formal perfection and high-frequency sounds of Mozart's violin concertos made them the healthiest music ever written.
"Mozart doesn't grab the passions like Chopin or weave a tapestry of ornament like Bach," says Campbell. "Beethoven sweeps you up in emotion, takes you here, takes you there, then lets you go. There's almost none of that in Mozart. Mozart is not about the individual. His music is about the architecture, not the person in there." In the book he puts it more poetically: "It is the transparency, the arches, the rhythms within the open space that so profoundly stir the human spirit."
In the mid-1990s, a University of California study showed that 36 undergraduates from the psychology department scored eight to nine points higher on spatial IQ tests after listening to 10 minutes of a Mozart sonata for two pianos. It concluded that complex music facilitates complex neural activity - and the accessibility and surface simplicity of Mozart's music may help "warm up" the brain. When the study hit the headlines across the US, some music shops sold out of Mozart recordings.
Music, as Campbell points out, affects the body as directly as it does the brain. It changes heartbeat, pulse rate and blood pressure; it reduces muscle tension and improves co-ordination; it can increase endorphin levels and even boost the immune system.
And what all music does, it seems, Mozart does better. In his series of Mozart Effect CDs, Campbell has assembled selections of Mozart's music for the home and car. But he stresses the importance of what he calls a healthy, balanced musical diet. A quick bop around the room to your favourite R&B album can provide a "sonic vitamin boost", while listening to jazz, which specialises in bringing a theme to the brink of chaos, then creating an ordered resolution, is good for raising creativity levels. "Music can change your mind in an instant," says Campbell. "If you're stressed out, it can help you relax. If you're sleepy, it can give you a burst of energy. Instantly."
Playing the slow movements of Mozart concertos all day long, then, isn't what it's about. In his new book, The Mozart Effect For Children, Campbell suggests music-based exercises and activities for children up to about 10 years old - including those still in the womb. Like its predecessor, it is bursting with facts, figures, ideas and enthusiasm, and there is no doubting Campbell's sincerity.
He has arrived in Dublin fresh - or, rather, extremely jet-lagged - from a visit to the Yamaha Music Foundation in Tokyo, which is about to take his books on board as study aids. "Not bad," he says with a slightly bleary grin. "They have 650,000 music students a week."
Another city, another seminar. Does he ever get sick of music? He looks stunned, then throws back his head and laughs. "I had one night free in Frankfurt this week," he says. "I'd just gotten off the plane from Singapore - a 14-hour flight - and I had come from Japan before that. And what did I do? I went to see Die Frau Ohne Schatten at the Frankfurt Opera." The atonal three-acter by Richard Strauss is not, to put it mildly, easy going. "Music is an incredible bridge for mind and body. I never get tired of it. How could you ever get tired of the St Matthew Passion? The jazz musician Charlie Parker put it perfectly. He said: 'Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.' "
Music maestros
Music is routinely played to intensive-care patients at St Agnes Hospital in Baltimore. According to a heart specialist there, half an hour of music produces the same effect as 10 milligrams of Valium.
At Helen Keller Hospital in Alabama, an experiment with 59 newborns found that 94per cent of crying babies fell asleep immediately without a bottle or soother when exposed to music.
In monasteries in Brittany, monks play music to animals in their care - and have found cows serenaded with Mozart to give more milk.
At Michigan State University, researchers found that listening to music for 15 minutes increased interleukin-1 levels by more than 10 per cent. Interleukins are proteins protective against AIDS and cancer.
A 1993 study in Florida investigated what kind of "hold" music telephone callers preferred. It found they waited longest while listening to jazz played by Miles Davis or John McLaughlin. Pachelbel's Canon inspired them to hang up. Buskers, please note.