Dear Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory: Bring Music to the (Picnic) Table
“Slumping in their cells like wet dishrags.” This is how Dr. Alfred Tomatis described the monks of Abbaye d’En-Calcat in France in the late 1960s. Why had the whole monastery become depressed? Other doctors couldn’t figure it out, but the musically minded Tomatis intuited that it was because of recent restrictions imposed on the monks’ chanting by the Vatican. Let them sing again, Tomatis told the abbot, and they’ll be fine. The abbot agreed, and the monastery sprang back to life.
Worried that my two teenage sons would suffer a similar slump when COVID-19 first swept across Toronto...