Health Care Fine Art

Hitting the Right Notes To Aid the Ill

Cathy Maglaras plays the harp for a patient

Mary Ishimoto Morris wrote an article for the Washington Post last week about therapeutic music. She explains:

Not to be confused with music therapy, in which music is used to engage individuals or groups in pursuit of a specific treatment goal, therapeutic music is played live at the bedside of people facing physical, emotional or spiritual challenges, in the hope of creating a healing environment for them.

Therapeutic musician Carol Joy Loeb says that 80 percent of therapeutic musicians play the harp. She also stresses that the "live human touch" is essential; apparently iPods and CDs don't have the same effect.

"It's important for us to be able to watch the patient and react musically. We look at how they're breathing, at their facial muscles to see how relaxed they are, to know if we have to change the key, the rhythm, the melody."

To read the full article click here

To learn more about this therapeutic music, there is an organization dedicated to it called Music for Healing and Transition Program. Their website is www.mhtp.org

More of what I want to listen to when I'm sick

"Chants, Hymns and Dances" on ECM
Anja Lechner on cello, Vassilis Tsabropoulos on piano

A month ago I reported on a CD that I would like to listen to when I'm sick (click here). Now I've found another one that I think will work. I can feel myself relax as I listen to it; it's almost mesmerizing. Download/listen MP3

Personally I find a lot of "New Age" music hard to appreciate. I find it too much like fast food. It does not hold up well to careful listening; too much like elevator music. But this CD is different. As one reviewer on Amazon.com put it:

...the music is thoroughly tranquil without being shallow, or just pretty, or simply slow and empty. This sets both the music and the performances apart from a lot of "meditative" recordings that too often yield to an overly static, conservative drone.

You can hear more of the songs or to buy the CD on Amazon.com. 

UPDATE: Steve Mays shares his take on my choice in "sick music."

Take it, it's good for you!

Kids receiving their daily dose of cod-liver oil from a teacher

Kids used to be forced to take Cod Liver oil because experts said it was good for you. It has been described as having the intense and obnoxious odor of rotten fish and rancid oil.

Sometimes I think connoisseur's are doing the same thing when they make the general public look at art they don't like. They feel it is their responsibility to educate those whose tastes are not as advanced. In schools, galleries and museums I can accept that argument; but not in hospitals.

It is wrong to make people in hospitals look at art that they don't like. There are enough other unpleasant things going on that to increase discomfort. We don't need to add art to the list.

It is very clear what people don't like. This has been studied hundreds of times in countries all over the world. Regular people don't like abstract art. You can see this illustrated by clicking here.

This post was prompted by listening to a new CD that I just bought: Gloria Cheng's Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky & Lutoslawski. After I was half-way through the disc I realized I was listening to it because it was good for me, not because I enjoyed it. Perhaps in time I will learn to appreciate it, but meanwhile I switched to Scarlatti: Keyboard Sonatas played by Andras Schiff. Within seconds of putting it on I started to feel more relaxed. The dogs even came back into the room...

Note: These days people still take Cod Liver oil, but usually in gel caps labeled as alpha-3 Omega. The gel caps do a pretty good job of hiding the disgusting smell.

What I want to listen to when I'm sick

When I get sick I hope I can somehow shut out the frightening noises in the hospital and listen to the ancient vocal music of Hildegard von Bingen. Even when I am not sick I find the music deeply relaxing and comforting.  Music like this should be perfect to help reduce the anxiety that everyone feels as a patient in a hospital.

But it is always hard to pick music for others. You may find the music repetitious, flat and dull. So I've inserted one of the songs for you to try out.

I was able to buy this CD on Amazon.com for $7.20 click here

Vivien Schweitzer wrote a review of the CD in last weeks Sunday New York Times:

HILDEGARD VON BINGEN: CELESTIAL HARMONIES

Oxford Camerata; Jeremy Summerly, conductor. Naxos 8.557983; CD.

It is unsurprising that in an increasingly hectic world, where even snatched moments of tranquility are invariably disturbed by cellphone bleeps, the mystically soothing music of Hildegard von Bingen seems eternally popular.

Von Bingen, a 12th-century abbess who was the 10th child of an aristocratic family, boldly founded her own convent at Rupertsberg, where the well-to-do sisters were criticized for their fondness for jewelry and other worldly pleasures. The music of von Bingen, who was also a poet, a playwright, a theologian, an author of treatises on natural history, an adviser to local male luminaries and a visionary (whose hallucinations were probably provoked by migraines), was rediscovered in the early 1980s. Her works have been frequently recorded since, with a spate of recordings in 1998, the 900th anniversary of her birth.

Jeremy Summerly conducts the Oxford Camerata in this new disc, featuring responsories and antiphons from von Bingen’s “Symphony of the Harmony of Heavenly Revelations,” a collection of 77 songs and one music drama completed around 1150.

The eight monophonic selections are set to von Bingen’s colorful texts and addressed to groups and individuals including (among others) the Creator, the Redeemer, the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John the Evangelist and Martyrs. The excerpts are excellently sung here, with elegantly shaped phrasing and subtly nuanced inflections, by two alternating groups of four women and four men. The contrast between the male and female timbres breaks the occasional monophonic monotony of the plainsong genre.

The singers reflect both the music’s sensuality and its spirituality. The women in particular are notable for their well-blended sound and pure voices, which soar rapturously but with appropriate decorum in the slightly reverberant acoustics of the Chapel of Hertford College, Oxford, where the disc was recorded

I was able to buy this CD on Amazon.com for $7.20 click here

Vivien Schweitzer wrote a review of the CD in last weeks Sunday New York Times:

HILDEGARD VON BINGEN: CELESTIAL HARMONIES

Oxford Camerata; Jeremy Summerly, conductor. Naxos 8.557983; CD.

It is unsurprising that in an increasingly hectic world, where even snatched moments of tranquility are invariably disturbed by cellphone bleeps, the mystically soothing music of Hildegard von Bingen seems eternally popular.

Von Bingen, a 12th-century abbess who was the 10th child of an aristocratic family, boldly founded her own convent at Rupertsberg, where the well-to-do sisters were criticized for their fondness for jewelry and other worldly pleasures. The music of von Bingen, who was also a poet, a playwright, a theologian, an author of treatises on natural history, an adviser to local male luminaries and a visionary (whose hallucinations were probably provoked by migraines), was rediscovered in the early 1980s. Her works have been frequently recorded since, with a spate of recordings in 1998, the 900th anniversary of her birth.

Jeremy Summerly conducts the Oxford Camerata in this new disc, featuring responsories and antiphons from von Bingen’s “Symphony of the Harmony of Heavenly Revelations,” a collection of 77 songs and one music drama completed around 1150.

The eight monophonic selections are set to von Bingen’s colorful texts and addressed to groups and individuals including (among others) the Creator, the Redeemer, the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John the Evangelist and Martyrs. The excerpts are excellently sung here, with elegantly shaped phrasing and subtly nuanced inflections, by two alternating groups of four women and four men. The contrast between the male and female timbres breaks the occasional monophonic monotony of the plainsong genre.

The singers reflect both the music’s sensuality and its spirituality. The women in particular are notable for their well-blended sound and pure voices, which soar rapturously but with appropriate decorum in the slightly reverberant acoustics of the Chapel of Hertford College, Oxford, where the disc was recorded

How Music Heals

Dr. Claudius Conrad studies how music eases pain

Does music heal? If so, how?

The New York Times explored this in an article (A Musician Who Performs With a Scalpel by David Dobbs) on May 20th: click here.

The article explores the work that Dr. Claudius Conrad is doing on the impact of music on healing:

But to the extent that music heals, how does it heal? The physiological pathways responsible have remained obscure, and the search for an underlying mechanism has moved slowly.

Now Dr. Conrad is trying to change that. He recently published a provocative paper suggesting that music may exert healing and sedative effects partly through a paradoxical stimulation of a growth hormone generally associated with stress rather than healing.

Dr. Conrad is a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School. His own interest in music lead to an earlier dissertation which examined why and how Mozart’s music seemed to ease the pain of intensive-care patients.

Thanks to Kim Reiss for sending me the link to this article.

Virtual Music Therapy

I've been a bit preoccupied by music the last few weeks so the movie we watched tonight fit right in. It was Immortal Beloved (1994) with Gary Oldman playing Beethoven.

Oldman does a great job of showing the torture of going deaf and the movie lets you get in his head and experience it with him. We hear low rumbles instead of the voices of people talking around him; very isolating.

It is only when he imagines music that he gets relief from his tortured existence; a sort of virtual musical therapy. You can see his face relax as he closes his eyes and drifts off into music he is imagining.   

There was a seamless match of Beethoven's music with the scenes in the movie. For example, in one dream sequence the young Beethoven is laying on his back floating in a lake at night. The camera pulls back and we see him floating on a bed of stars. During that scene the soundtrack plays "Ode to Joy" from from the 9th Symphony.

WARNING: Don't buy a Blu-ray DVD player yet. You may be tempted by get one of these new machines that show movies in more detail, but based on my experience I would say don't. They are not ready for prime time.

I bought one from Sony and it has been a serious disappointment. I thought it was just mine but I keep hearing the same stories from people who own other brands. They are painfully slow to start after turning on and the controls operate so slowly that it is easy to get frustrated. My advice: Wait till next Christmas for the second-generation players to come out.

Outlaw Tone Controls

Test: Next time you are in a rental car, check and see where the bass and treble controls are set.

Over the last couple of years, every rental car I have been in has the tone controls set the same: MAXIMUM.

Last week we were on a car lot checking out a Toyota and I asked the saleswoman to show me how the tone controls worked. Sure enough, treble and bass were set to the maximum.

This must mean that people believe that, as always, more is better. Having the tone controls in their neutral position must somehow be wrong. But I almost always pick neutral. Unless something sounds wrong, then I adjust up or down. My new stereo doesn't even have tone controls.

With the treble to the max, the music sounds grating. With the bass set to the max, the low frequencies sound boomy. Do people actually prefer this? Certainly this is not what the musicians had in mind.

If we outlawed tone controls, car radios would sound much better.

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

Alex Primm was visiting me the day my new stereo was being delivered. Seeing my renewed interest in music, he suggested a book by one of the writers for the New Yorker, the music critic Alex Ross. "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century"

The book is great, but the music he is writing about has no place in hospitals. He is writing about challenging composers like Schoenberg and Mahler. This would never have a calming effect on sick patients.

It made me think about how so much contemporary visual art is also inappropriate in a HealthCare setting. Abstract art and conceptual art works well in museums and galleries, but usually not in hospitals.

Innovators in art and music want to push the boundaries. Their goal is not to induce peace, but rather challenge the accepted norm, to create something New.

If you are interested in challenging and thought provoking music, then in addition to this excellent book I also strongly suggest a blog that Alex Ross has: www.therestisnoise.com