Against the backdrop of a cultural shift over the past 15 years – where shows like “American Idol,” “Glee,” and “The Voice” have topped the charts, and where community choir participation has increased by 33% – the scientific community has made ground-breaking inroads into understanding the biomechanics of song and documenting its transformational healing powers.
With technological advances in imaging, scientists have verified significant changes in heart rate, blood pressure, antibodies, stress levels, breathing, hormone production, memory, cognition, speech, neural activity, and even brain anatomy, through singing and/or listening to music.
Patients with the gamut of chronic health conditions – ranging from cancer to stroke to Parkinson’s – have benefitted from the very real applications of these scientific discoveries, and their case studies have been documented in peer-reviewed medical journals worldwide.
Now armed with a wealth of indisputable data, doctors and scientists at leading institutes are working to persuade health insurance companies to recognize the validity of music as medicine, the same way those companies currently recognize the validity of pharmaceutical drugs. As Emmy award-wining journalist Elena Mannes notes in her book, The Power of Music: Pioneering Discoveries in the New Science of Song, “Today, science is transforming the idea of music as medicine from myth and guesswork to treatments with proven effect.”
Meanwhile, for millenia, mothers instantaneously have soothed their children’s pain or distress, by singing lullabies; religious leaders profoundly have altered people’s consciousness, by singing spiritual chants; opera singers have shattered glass, by singing at a specific pitch; and everyday people have uplifted their moods and felt transported back in time, by singing or playing a certain song. None of these hundreds of generations of people needed science to validate what they already knew to be true.
Similarly, three decades ago, Donatella Moltisanti – an opera-singer-turned-healer – trusted her own experience, instead of waiting around for science to catch up with her. Newly-graduated from an Italian music conservatory, where she had studied opera performance and teaching, Moltisanti discovered that her voice catalyzed profound transformations in herself, her students, and her audience members: When she sang, she felt transported to an altered state of consciousness and higher state of awareness, while those around her reported spontaneous emotional breakthroughs and metaphysical experiences. Over the course of their vocal and breath work with Moltisanti, some opera students even experienced physical healings, from ailments as pronounced as scoliosis.
Since then, Moltisanti embarked on a quest to understand and amplify the power of music as a channel for healing. To this end, she studied with numerous spiritual teachers from diverse modalities of healing, and ultimately, she developed the Moltisanti Soul Healing method – a six-step process that helps individuals access their core being, let go of residue from trauma, and express themselves authentically. At the core of this work are the Moltisanti Soul Singing method, a music-based healing that fuses classical opera, sacred Eastern music, and improvised vocalization, and the Moltisanti Conscious Breathing method, a tool for awakening the body and becoming both spiritually aligned and emotionally grounded, by mastering the breath.
On March 1, Moltisanti releases her debut CD, Moltisanti Soul Singing, through which she invites listeners into a profound state of meditation and relaxation, while immersed in the healing and transformative power of the human voice. This double CD includes 17 elegant music tracks featuring a cappella vocals and crystal singing bowls, in some cases with the accompaniment of violin and guitar. An additional 17 introductory tracks offering meditation guidance for each music track. Following the path on which Moltisanti has taken her clients for the past 30 years, the first CD is devoted to healing brokenness, and the second CD is devoted to manifesting greatness. Throughout it all, Moltisanti’s voice is rich, soulful, and resonant – soothing the nerves and comforting the heart as would a mother’s lullaby, while commanding attention and transporting the listener into a whole-being journey of awakening.