MAGIC FLUTES: Mozart, in a portrait by Gerrit Greve; his music has been used to treat ailments ranging from acne to Alzheimer's disease.
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Michelle Quatron doesn't have a clue why Mozart's music works, but she says she can see the effect on her 6-year-old daughter Lucy, who is autistic. "She used to sit in a corner and have no interaction with anyone," Quatron says. Two years ago, she began taking Lucy to a center in Lewes, England, that uses the Tomatis method of playing music through what's called an "electronic ear" — essentially regular headphones with a piece in the middle that vibrates against the scalp, conveying sounds through bone conduction. Tomatis and his followers claim that this has a profound impact on patients' ability to hear and listen to others and themselves, which is the core of the treatment. Still, since there's no conventional scientific proof for the method, health authorities in many countries, including the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S., don't recognize it.
Quatron says she was skeptical about the treatment at first, but is now a convert. "The first thing that astonished us is that she allowed it to happen — that she sat for two hours listening to Mozart, and not just once but every day for 14 days," Quatron says. And she's thrilled with the changes she sees. "Lucy is making friends. Her eye contact has improved and her language has come on so much. It's like she's opening out. She's coming right out of herself."
In the official world of music therapy, such methods are viewed as hokey. That's because registered therapists working with handicapped or troubled children usually get them to make music as a way of expressing themselves and interacting with one another. In Britain, where music therapy has been a registered health profession since 1999, Gary Ansdell at the Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy Center in London points out that "it's all about active music making, not passive listening." Ansdell is also scornful of Don Campbell and his "Mozart effect" empire. "It has to be more complex than that," he says. "We're not doing Mozart a favor to reduce him to an effect."
But in this Mozart anniversary year, it seems, anything goes. Just ask Carlo Cagnozzi. He's a Tuscan winemaker in Montalcino, near Siena, who has been piping Mozart to his vines for the past five years. He first had the idea as a young man, when he would bring his accordion to the grape harvest. Playing Mozart round the clock to his grapes has a dramatic effect, he claims. "It ripens them faster," he says, adding that it also keeps away parasites and birds. If Mozart had really been buried in a pauper's grave, he would probably be spinning in it. But with so little still understood about the psychological and physiological effects of music, researchers from the University of Florence are now studying Cagnozzi's claims. Says Don Campbell, the Mozart effect author: "Mozart has universal appeal. The discussion needs to continue. We are just beginning to ask the right questions." The swirling controversy seems sure to continue — and Campbell will carry on selling his CDs. Even if his claims about Mozart's music making us smarter are bogus, he's helping to introduce a lot of people to a composer whose music remains relevant, 250 years after his birth.