WAKING THE SPIRIT

Nonfiction

Soaring notes and a miracle

WAKING THE SPIRIT

A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul

By Andrew Schulman

312 pp. Picador

Reviewed by Sue Ellis

Waking the Spirit is professional musician Andrew Schulman’s touching account of expanding his repertoire into the theater of healing. He plays his guitar to stimulate the will to live in people who are gravely ill. 

He begins with his own near-death experience, a devastating event brought on by complications of anaphylactic shock following surgery. After three days in ICU, his wife, Wendy, has a sudden inspiration – perhaps music can revive him. She chooses Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, a favorite of Schulman’s, and thanks to earbud cords and an iPod, the soaring notes work a miracle, a fact witnessed by a young doctor in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. Here’s an excerpt:

By early evening, Dr. Eiref told Wendy, with cautious optimism, that I was “out of the woods.” The medical charts, my SICU progress notes report would wind up being over three hundred pages long, bore witness in precise numbers that the music was the turning point. Before that it was clear that everyone expected me to die. And afterward, everything started getting better.

After being brought out of his coma, a grateful Schulman realizes that he wants to give back to the hospital, Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in New York, by playing his guitar for patients as desperately ill as he has been. He sets to work choosing the music most likely to rouse the human spirit. It’s no small task, a subject thoroughly covered in the book.

As Schulman witnesses the effects of his music on patients, his fascination with the science of music therapy blossoms. He begins to research and document the history of the craft, which can be traced to biblical times. There’s hard science to back his personal observations of the power of music, as he soon learns, and over time he becomes affiliated with the hospital’s continuing study of music’s effect on healing. 

Perhaps one of the best things about the book is being able to feel Schulman’s passionate interest in the subject. And if there’s a secret to holding our interest, surely it’s the intensity with which he writes and his conversational method of describing the encounters he’s had with his most memorable patients. The following excerpt is a personal note to Schulman from one of his patients:

I don’t remember much from those first few days in the hospital, but I do remember the guitar. The music soothed me, and I was grateful for something to focus on besides my pain and fear. Specifically, I remember giving you a thumbs-up as you played ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ Listening to you play guitar was one of the few moments of peace that I can remember from the entirety of my stay at Beth Israel . . . . I am also a musician and as I play these days I often pause to reflect on the healing power of music . . . . I thank you.

What begins as a story of personal healing, by chapter evolves into a story of public service that carries readers along with a thoughtful history of music therapy. It’s an interesting and essential guide for anyone in need of or intrigued by a powerful curative that’s been under our noses all along.