ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author reports that the tentative experiments and hypotheses are those of three members of the Department of Pathology, College of Medicine, Ohio State University. Their work was supported by the Lancaster Foundation, Bethesda, Maryland, and also by the Maharishi Ayur–Veda Foundation of America. There are three reasons for selecting their research paper as an opening example in the collaborative historical enquiry into music's healing potential. First, it can stand as an extreme instance of how seriously the powers of music are nowadays being taken — a ne plus ultra of musical therapy to set against the provocatively glum panorama with which the author prefaced it. Second, the research paper represents the ambiguous status of musical therapeutics today. A third reason for using this research paper is that it opens up a historical perspective. The worlds of 'western' music therapy and 'traditional' musical healing are hardly far removed from one another in geographical terms.
