Micro Music Laboratories, Medical Music 04

Medical Music
Music & Health· The natural Responsibility of the Classical Composer page 1 2 3 4

JOURNALIST: So do you personally only listen to music which is conducive to health?

PETER HUEBNER: No, I also give serious practical thought to dissonant music. But I use my Medical Resonance Therapy Music as a natural counterbalance for regenerating the influences of disharmonious music.

It seems foolish to me to want to avoid stress on principle. But the more you subject yourself to stress, the more you must do to counterbalance it, in order to reduce the stress. A lot of activity must be accompanied by long rest periods.

Applying endurance tests is particularly common in research into the strength of biological systems, and here, too, disharmonious music might be able to play a part.
But that concerns test orders which are scientifically monitored by doctors, and not tests in kindergardens, schools and public places.

On the scientific side they can be justified, on the other side – in the case of using disharmonious music in kindergardens, schools and public places or in the media – they must be called foolish, because here their use is unscientific and careless from a medical point of view.

Let me emphasise it once again – this is not about taste, about culture, art or genius, this is about illness or health.
Our society attaches greater importance to health than to art.
That is why in medicine, people are called to account in their training and activities to a much greater extent than in art.

Even if, according to Basic Law, art, science and theory are considered to be equally free, the protection of health has a much greater standing than observing taste or an aesthetic attitude. For this reason, I believe, in modern society music will sooner or later be subordinate to those important principles of preserving health, and regarded and categorised just like food or addictive substances or remedies. And this categorisation will be based on two things: objective scientific results of investigations in the field of medicine, and sound musicological research.

JOURNALIST: So in future there will be instructions on CDs, as to whether this music is beneficial to health, safe in terms of your health or harmful to your health?

PETER HUEBNER: For me this is only a question of time, and the extent of democratic development in society.
The higher developed societies will lead the way in this respect, and the others will follow them. No society wants to be destroyed.
And the core way of averting such a thing is without doubt to support health as well as to avoid social damage – that is to support methods of healing which are objective and scientifically verifiable and to avoid influences which damage people’s health – as we already know it nowadays from the fight against the cocaine trade and similar things.

Your original question was previously: why I show so much tolerance towards disharmonious music, although I have devoted myself to harmonious music. The answer is that I am able to afford this attitude, because the problems of harmonious and disharmonious music – as I have explained – are not so much a question relating to music or art, but primarily to medicine. And so these problems are first and foremost the responsibility of medical experts and legislation, and they can and will only be solved there. As a musicologist, music creator or artist I don’t need to have a strong opinion at all.

But at the same time I don’t see this as a question of the producers of dissonant music who are not the people responsible in kindergardens, in schools and in the media either.
They offer the disharmonious music products of which they are convinced exactly in the same way as I offer the harmonical music products of which I am convinced, and from a musicological and artistic point of view, we can face each other with musical respect.

And if their artistic products are brazenly removed from lessons for health reasons, and mine are introduced into kindergardens and schools for the same reason, I would not want to imagine that I was a better artist, a better composer or a better businessman, I would only see the reason for this in the fact that, unfortunately, there are so many people prone to illness in the present times, so many children and juveniles with health and behavioural disorders – a fact which must, of course, be taken into special account by society.

But if we succeed in strengthening health in our society in such a way that all children and juveniles are healthy, then the necessity for the use of harmonical music might possibly come to an end, and there will be more space again for the stress attacks of dissonant music which are interesting in a positive sense – as a kind of positive endurance test for the immune system.

One can say that I follow the health trend of our times, with the general need for individual, social and ecological harmony – whilst my colleagues, who have devoted themselves to dissonant music, follow the very interesting paths of new musical concepts and developments for which I have a lot of sense and which, as an artist, I more strongly share than many of them would dream of.

Well – I come from that direction, and for some time was considered an expert in this field. I don’t condemn this developments, instead I continue to follow them in an artistic sense – whereby afterwards I then have to expose myself very consciously and purposefully to my Medical Resonance Therapy Music for the purpose of reducing stress.

But personally, I wouldn’t dream of nowadays flooding the public and among it children, juveniles and adults with interesting musicological outpourings of the different aspects of disharmony – in times when human beings for purely medical reasons need just the opposite. So I do indeed have my private life with my musicological research and developments, but at the same time a clear procedure of selection for what I can ask of the public.

I tolerate anybody who has a different opinion on this or is even of the opposite opinion, and I am glad that I am able to afford this tolerance, for the social responsibility for this lies alone in the hands of medical experts and legislation, as well as the parents who can exert their influence on legislation through their elected representatives.