Getting Mellow with Music
by Melissa Hampton
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Art with Altitude.
Every life has rough patches. Unforeseen events knock us off-center, making things feel bleak: a serious injury, the loss of someone we love, relationship tangles or a job that doesn’t work out. These rough patches can last a few days … or much longer. According to a recent study by The Kaiser Family Foundation, the rate of depression and anxiety in the U.S. is approximately 33%. That’s 115,000,000 of us who struggle—at some point in our lives—with our sense of well-being.
Solutions? The traditional choice is pharmacology: antidepressants that work by increasing the levels of certain “feel-good” brain chemicals called neurotransmitters. And while drug therapy can be successful for some, it doesn’t work for everyone. More to the point, given the inequities in our healthcare system, not everyone has access to help.
In the past two decades, new studies have explored alternative approaches to alleviating the pain of mental health disorders, gaining credibility in the scientific community and showing real-life benefits for patients. I’m talking about the fields of art therapy and music therapy. Music, in particular, has the greatest potential to reach people who do not otherwise have access to, or cannot afford, care—because music is everywhere. The field is still new, but already, music therapy has demonstrated impressive effectiveness in reducing depression, anxiety and chronic pain.
Here are a few examples: In Boston, at Massachusetts General Hospital, live music in hospital corridors has been remarkably effective in reducing the need for sedatives and/or pain medication in patients undergoing high-stress procedures like colonoscopies, cardiac angiography or knee surgery.
MusiCorps helps wounded veterans regain—or learn for the first time—the ability to play an instrument. The program also provides professional prosthetics to re-fit a compromised body with cool tools to strum a guitar without a hand, work foot pedals on a drum without a leg or hold a saxophone with only one arm.
Music is even effective in soothing the psyches of our canine buddies. In Madrid, police dogs get music therapy to reduce stress from sniffing out explosives. The program is called the Mozart Effect, and as it turns out, dogs also have their musical preferences: soft rock and classical music calm the savage beast, while pop and heavy metal agitate the poor pups. There is no question that music has a direct impact on our biology. It can calm us, reducing heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol levels.
Beyond its powerful influence on our individual psyches, music has the ability to influence behavior and even politics. During the Great Depression and through World War II, Woody Guthrie’s banjo bore the phrase “This machine kills fascists.” Pete Seeger also understood the power of music to change views and emotions. He famously said, “Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.”
“The Times They Are a-Changin’,” the title track of Bob Dylan’s 1964 album, gave a collective voice to a generation of young people expressing their frustrations and desire for change—making Dylan’s music not just entertainment but a form of activism.
Over the next five years, our nation’s medical research community is dedicating $20 million to bring together music therapy and neuroscience, studying music’s potential not only in the treatment of mental illnesses but also in an array of other disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, stroke and post-traumatic stress disorder. And while it’s great to have the scientific affirmation, it’s something most of us have always known: music can heal us.
So when that next rough patch comes, remember Pete Seeger’s advice and find “the right song at the right moment.” It might make all the difference.
Elevate the Arts: Feeling stressed or overwhelmed? Buy tickets to a concert at Strings Music Pavilion, go to a free concert at the Free Summer Concert Series, disappear into the music at Schmiggitys, Old Town Pub or Perry-Mansfield or just turn on your phone, find a station and close your eyes for a few minutes. MH
