NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 6 A Friend Found in Music (poem by Bryanna T. Perkins) — Learning Beyond the Text

Book page 201–202 Updated on2026-09-08

Q1.

I. Did you know, India’s rich musical heritage has a lot to offer to our well-being? Raga Chikitsa, one of the ancient texts, elaborates on the healing properties of music. A seventeenth century work titled Sangita Sudha gives an account of the effects of music on emotions. Find out how music is used as an alternative therapy in the present times.

Answer

Start from the poem’s own claim — “Music is the therapy / I need when I feel blue” — and find out how far the claim is now taken seriously outside poetry.

What a good find-out answer must contain: a definition of music therapy; the difference between listening and making music as treatment; two or three fields where it is actually used; one Indian connection; and an honest line about what music therapy does not claim to do.

Sample answer:

What it is. Music therapy is the planned use of music by a trained therapist to work towards a stated goal — reducing anxiety, restoring speech, improving movement. It is not the same as putting on a pleasant song; there is an assessment, a goal and a review, exactly as in physiotherapy.
Two methods. Receptive therapy (the patient listens, and the therapist chooses tempo and mood deliberately) and active therapy (the patient sings, drums or improvises, which is used where movement or speech has to be rebuilt).
Where it is used today. In hospitals, to lower anxiety and the need for sedation before surgery; in stroke rehabilitation, where singing can carry words that speech cannot yet manage; with children on the autism spectrum, to build turn-taking and joint attention; in dementia care, where songs learnt in youth are often remembered long after names are lost; and in palliative care, for pain and distress.
Why rhythm in particular. Steady beats help people with Parkinson’s disease to walk more evenly — the technique is called rhythmic auditory stimulation. This is the poem’s “Music is the rhythm / That moves me to the core” taken almost literally.
The Indian thread. Raga Chikitsa assigns particular ragas to particular conditions and times of day, and Sangita Sudha (seventeenth century) describes music’s effect on the emotions. Several Indian hospitals and universities now run raga-based sessions and research programmes, and there are professional bodies training music therapists in India today.
The honest limit. Music therapy is used alongside medical treatment and not instead of it. Evidence is strongest for anxiety, mood and rehabilitation; it is not a cure for disease.

The link back to the chapter: the poem says music makes sure she can “pull through” — a phrase about surviving something hard. Music therapy is that claim tested and measured. It is worth noticing that a fifteenth-century Sanskrit text and a modern hospital ward have reached the same conclusion by very different routes.

Q2.

II. Everything in nature has a rhythm or sound vibration, even our heartbeat. Speak to your music teacher and find out about the origin of the seven swaras (notes) of Indian classical music.

Answer

Ask your music teacher first — the point of the task is the conversation. What follows is what you should come away knowing, so that you can ask better questions.

Swara	Full name	Traditionally associated sound
Sa	Shadja	the cry of the peacock
Re	Rishabha	the lowing of the bull
Ga	Gandhara	the bleating of the goat
Ma	Madhyama	the call of the heron / krauncha
Pa	Panchama	the song of the cuckoo
Dha	Dhaivata	the neighing of the horse
Ni	Nishada	the trumpeting of the elephant

The two things worth understanding, beyond the list:

Why Shadja means ‘born of six’. The name says that the other six notes are generated from it. Sa is not simply the first note; it is the reference, and a singer may set it wherever the voice is comfortable. Every other swara is defined by its relation to that chosen Sa — which is why Indian music needs no fixed absolute pitch the way a piano does.
Why the animals are in the story at all. The traditional association of each swara with a creature’s call, recorded in early texts such as the Natya Shastra, is a teaching device as much as a theory: it fixes seven abstract pitches in a student’s memory by attaching each to a sound already known. It also carries the idea the book states in the question — that music is heard as something found in nature rather than invented.

Questions worth asking your teacher: Which of the seven never change (Sa and Pa are achala, fixed)? What are komal and tivra? How do the twelve notes of an octave arise from these seven? And why does the Carnatic system name them differently while using the same seven syllables?

Q3.

III. You must have read or heard poems and songs about music—both in English and in your own language. Share some of them with your classmates and create a collection of these poems and songs together.

Answer

A class collection is a small anthology, so it needs an order and a note on each entry, not just a list of titles.

Method:

Everyone brings two pieces — one in English and one in the language spoken at home. Song lyrics count.
Write a three-line note for each: who wrote it, what it says music does, and one line worth quoting.
Group them by what they claim about music, not by language. You will find the same few claims recurring — music as memory, as comfort, as devotion, as celebration, as something that outlasts the singer.
Add the poems this chapter already gives you: Bryanna T. Perkins’s A Friend Found in Music, and Walter de la Mare’s Music, printed on page 202.
Give the collection a title and an index, and hand-copy or print it. A collection that stays in a folder is not shared.

Sample answer — three entries at the level expected:

Piece	What it claims about music	Line worth quoting
Music — Walter de la Mare (page 202 of this book)	Music replaces the ordinary world with a heightened one; it takes the listener out of time.	“When music sounds, gone is the earth I know, / And all her lovely things even lovelier grow”
A Friend Found in Music — Bryanna T. Perkins	Music is companionship and treatment — it gets a person through a bad time.	“Music is the needed friend / When no one seems to care.”
A bhajan or folk song from your own language	Usually devotion or shared celebration rather than private comfort — a different claim altogether.	(the line your family sings most often)

What the collection will teach you: put ten pieces side by side and a pattern appears — poems in English about music tend to describe a private experience of listening, while many Indian songs about music describe a shared one, sung in company or in worship. That difference is worth a page of discussion, and it is a discovery you can only make by collecting.

Q4.

IV. Read and enjoy the poem given below. Music — Walter de la Mare When music sounds, gone is the earth I know, / And all her lovely things even lovelier grow; / Her flowers in vision flame, her forest trees / Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies. When music sounds, out of the water rise / Naiads* whose beauty dims my waking eyes, / Rapt in strange dreams burns each enchanted face, / With solemn echoing stirs their dwelling-place. When music sounds, all that I was I am / Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came; / And from Time’s woods break into distant song / The swift-winged hours, as I hasten along. *Note: Naiad—a water nymph said to inhabit a river, spring, or waterfall.

Answer

The book gives this poem for pleasure, not for examination — but it is placed here as a deliberate contrast with the poem you have just studied, and reading the two together teaches more than either alone.

What de la Mare says. Each stanza begins with the same three words — “When music sounds” — and then describes what changes. In the first, the familiar world becomes more beautiful than itself: flowers flame in vision, and the trees “Lift burdened branches, stilled with ecstasies.” In the second, water nymphs rise out of the water — the ordinary world is replaced by a dreamed one. In the third, music restores him to what he was before he was born into “this haunt of brooding dust”, and the hours themselves turn into distant song.

	A Friend Found in Music (Perkins)	Music (de la Mare)
Repeated opening	“Music is the…” — a definition repeated	“When music sounds…” — a condition repeated
What music does	Comforts, heals, keeps company	Transforms the world and returns him to an earlier self
Language	Plain, everyday, no word needing a dictionary	Rich and archaic — ere, rapt, naiads, ecstasies
Where the poet stands	In her own daily life — sad, cheerful, lonely	Outside ordinary life altogether, in vision
Chief device	Metaphor (music is an ocean, a friend)	Imagery — sight above all: flames, water, burning faces

The one line to notice most: “all that I was I am / Ere to this haunt of brooding dust I came” — that is, while the music lasts he is everything he was before he came into this dusty, brooding world. De la Mare’s claim is far larger than Perkins’s: she says music helps her get through a bad week, he says music briefly undoes his whole existence. Both are true claims about music, and the difference between them is a difference of register, not of sincerity. Reading a plain poem and a grand poem on one subject is the quickest way to see that no single style has a monopoly on truth.

Two small technical points worth carrying away: de la Mare rhymes in couplets (know/grow, trees/ecstasies), which gives a heavier, more sealed sound than Perkins’s open abcb; and both poets use anaphora — the repeated phrase at the head of the stanza — which shows how one device can produce a chant in one poem and a quiet insistence in another.

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