Musical intelligence is the ability to perceive, make and understand music (pitch, rhythm, timbre and melody), which the psychologist Howard Gardner counted as one of his original seven intelligences, as much an intelligence as language. Rhythm and song matter in shamanic work because rhythm is one of the oldest ways into the shamanic state, song can carry healing, and the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer itself is more like music than like words. Therapeutic Shamanism also questions the common idea that music proves humans superior, pointing to the songs of birds and whales.
What is musical intelligence? #
One of the seven intelligences Gardner set out in Frames of Mind in 1983. In his words it “entails skill in the performance, composition, and appreciation of musical patterns”, and its core includes sensitivity to pitch, rhythm, timbre and harmony. He regards it as built almost in parallel with linguistic intelligence, and finds it makes no sense to call language an intelligence and music a mere talent.1
Among his evidence are child prodigies such as the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who was entranced by the violin at three and performing internationally by ten, and people who lose musical ability after brain damage whilst keeping other abilities, a condition called amusia. Parts of the brain that matter for music are found mostly in the right hemisphere, though music is less neatly located in the brain than language.2
Is music uniquely human? #
Gardner himself suggests that birds show musical intelligence.3 Therapeutic Shamanism goes further. Music is often brought out as one of the obvious things that set humans above other animals. Humans certainly make an enormous variety of music, of great subtlety and complexity, but that subtlety mostly makes sense only to other humans. Most other animals seem fairly indifferent to human music. The usual assumption is that they cannot appreciate it; it may equally be that they find it dull. Until humans can actually communicate with other animals, there is no way of knowing which.
Meanwhile songbirds such as the nightingale produce astonishingly complex and beautiful music. By what objective measure could it be called less than human music? It may mean less to us, but that is a human bias, not a measure of intelligence. The same goes for whale song, which is enormously complex when analysed and whose meaning, if it has one, nobody yet knows. Treating musical ability as proof of human superiority rests on the assumptions of human supremacy. See What is the myth of human supremacy? and Do animals think and feel?
How old is human music? #
Very old, and possibly older than words. The archaeologist Steven Mithen, in The Singing Neanderthals (2005), proposes that music and language both grew out of a single earlier way of communicating among early humans and their relatives, made of whole, sung, gestural and emotionally charged messages, not words put together by rules. He points out that babies respond to the rhythm and melody of speech long before they understand words, that moving the body to a beat seems tied to the evolution of dance, and, drawing on the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, that making music together releases endorphins that bond a group.4 Mithen writes as a cognitive scientist and treats music’s use to communicate with the spirits as a product of evolved human abilities, not as contact with anything real; Therapeutic Shamanism does not share that frame.
Hunter-gatherers certainly sang, and sang a lot. When they were not hunting or gathering they spent much of their time singing, dancing, telling stories, laughing and playing.5 What they did not have were choirs, which are a recent, middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer thing.6 See What part do music, rhythm and dance play in shamanism?
Why does rhythm matter in shamanic work? #
Because rhythm is one of the main ways into the shamanic state of consciousness. Shamanic cultures have used dancing and shaking, singing and chanting, fasting and plants, but above all the steady beat of the drum or the rattle, or, among Aboriginal Australians, who lived by hunting and gathering before colonisation, the click-sticks and the didgeridoo.7 The steady rhythm is what counts, not musical skill: nobody needs to be musical to journey. Gardner, too, lists listening to music among the experiences that can take a person into an altered state.8 See What role do drumming, movement and other methods play in journeying? and Why do shamans use rattles?
Why does song matter in shamanic work? #
For several reasons, which have answers of their own. Song is one of the old ways into trance, and in Michael Harner‘s core shamanism each shaman has at least one power song to call on their helpers.9 In Therapeutic Shamanism singing turns up mostly inside journeys, where the GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this may have someone sing as part of their healing, or sing a lament with someone who is grieving. See Why do shamans sing, and what is a power song?
Underneath all of these is the nature of the Lower-World. It is largely beyond language, the realm of metaphor and imagery, akin to poetry, painting or music. Like great music, a true Lower-World journey works by evoking and suggesting, not by spelling things out, and leaves the journeyer their own ‘beholder’s share’ of the meaning.10 See Why are there no words or symbols in the Lower-World?
There is an older sense too. Animist cultures speak of the Original Instructions, sometimes called the Original Songs: the deep stories that give people healthy templates for living in right relationship with themselves, with each other and with the other-than-human world. Shamans were the keepers of them, helping their people to live by them.
Do you need to be musical to do shamanic work? #
No. Musical intelligence, like the others, varies from person to person, and some people find that music opens the door to journeying more easily. But journeying depends on imagination and on the steady beat, not on being able to sing in tune or play an instrument, and people who would never call themselves musical journey perfectly well. Where singing happens inside a journey, it is the Guides who bring it, and the point is what it does, not how it would sound to an audience. See What is artistic or creative intelligence?
