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In a fascinating article from the NY Times comes this new research:

For Claudius Conrad, a 30-year-old surgeon who has played the piano seriously since he was 5, music and medicine are entwined -- from the academic realm down to the level of the fine-fingered dexterity required at the piano bench and the operating table.

"If I don't play for a couple of days," said Dr. Conrad, a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School who also holds doctorates in stem cell biology and music philosophy, "I cannot feel things as well in surgery. My hands are not as tender with the tissue. They are not as sensitive to the feedback that the tissue gives you."

Like many surgeons, Dr. Conrad says he works better when he listens to music. And he cites studies, including some of his own, showing that music is helpful to patients as well -- bringing relaxation and reducing blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones, pain and the need for pain medication.

Music Soothes the Savage Beast, right? What it does seem to do is stimulate the healing process by increasing the pituitary growth hormone, which in turn "reduces the interleukin-6 and epinephrine levels that produce inflammation that in turn causes pain and raises blood pressure and the heart rate." It's a controversial hypothesis that requires further testing but is an interesting finding, nonetheless, and a perfect example of the potential of combining the right-brain, creative, musical background with the left-brain, researcher's logic of an M.D.

He goes on further to hypothesize why Mozart's music is particularly healing:

Dr. Conrad's music dissertation examined why and how Mozart's music seemed to ease the pain of intensive-care patients. He concentrated not on physiological mechanisms but on mechanisms within Mozart's music.

"It is still a controversial idea," he said recently, "whether Mozart has more of this sort of effect than other composers. But as a musician I wanted to look at how it might."

Dr. Conrad noted that Mozart used distinctive phrases that are fairly short, often only four or even two measures long, and then repeated these phrases to build larger sections. Yet he changed these figures often in ways the listener may not notice -- a change in left-hand arpeggios or chord structures, for instance, that slips by unremarked while the ear attends the right hand's melody, which itself may be slightly embellished.

These intricate variations are absorbed as part of a melodic accessibility so well organized that even a sonata for two pianos never feels crowded in the ear, even when it grows dense on the page. The melody lulls and delights while the underlying complexity stimulates.

And why would Mozart write such beautiful structures?

Mozart's letters and biographies, Dr. Conrad said, portray a man almost constantly sick, constantly fending off one infection or ailment after another.

"Whether he did it intentionally or not," Dr. Conrad said, "I think he composed music the way he did partly because it made him feel better."

Indeed, as any musician will testify, it just plain feels good to play! It's almost a survival mechanism...

Thank god Mozart was such a sickly fellow, eh?

Don't other Classical-style composers exhibit the same features--phrase length, embellishment or variation of accompanying figures, etc.--as Mozart? Hard to measure reliably, but I'd say Haydn at least, and probably others. But were they also sickly, unconsciously composing in ways that eased their misery? I think Dr. Conrad has an appealing hypothesis but I'm skeptical it will witthsand critical examination.

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