Mark Miller

Jeanne Kelly is a professional singer, conductor, and pianist who has worked for many years with major opera companies and symphonies in the Washington-Baltimore area, where she lives. In 2001, she was directing the Levine School of Music’s Arlington, Virginia, program when Dr. Gene Cohen approached her with an idea.

Dr. Cohen, who died in 2009, was one of the nation’s leading researchers on the effects that creativity can have on older adults and the aging process. He directed the Center on Aging, Health, and Humanities at George Washington University, where he was a professor of health-care sciences, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences.

Cohen helped to create a national movement around positive aging and argued against the old stereotype that aging leads inevitably to a decline in physical and mental capacit. His pioneering research demonstrated that life after 65 can be an important period of creativity and intellectual growth.

Encore chorales are made up of singers 55-plus. Some read music; some don’t. The goal of the groups is to sing, rehearse, perform, and have fun.

Cohen wanted to talk with Kelly about a new research project that would attempt to measure the impact on older adults of participation in a professionally run arts organization. He asked Kelly to help get the project started by forming several chorales for older adult singers that he could study. She’d need to start two new singing groups to join with a seniors’ chorale she already was directing at a local senior living facility.

Kelly formed the groups, which embarked on an ambitious and professionally oriented program of rehearsal and performance. Cohen’s research—conducted over a three-year period—focused on comparing the singing seniors with control groups that didn’t participate in similar activities.

The key finding: Sustained involvement in Kelly’s program resulted in a measurable, positive impact on overall health and longevity, doctor visits, medication use, falls, loneliness, and morale.

Meanwhile, Kelly—who was 51 herself when she first got involved in Cohen’s work—got hooked on arts programs for older adults. In 2007, she founded a not-for-profit organization called Encore Creativity for Older Adults to manage and develop the senior chorales. “I decided that I wanted to simply do art for older adults. We’ve expanded enormously since then, which tells me that people are retiring and they want sophistication, and that they want to carry on what they were doing in their careers or find something wonderful they have never done before.”

Jeanne Kelly

When Kelly first formed the chorales, the average singer’s age was 80, and many of them are still singing with Kelly 10 years later. Chorales have been formed in 10 locations around the Washington-Baltimore area, with singers ranging in age from 55 to 97. Encore Chorales are “no-cut”—anyone can join—but they’re dead serious about performance and professionalism. “Some have a background in singing, and some have never sung in their lives—someone at some point told them, ‘You shouldn’t sing.’ But if you teach someone to sing they will get it. We just seat them next to someone who is strong.” The chorales rehearse for two 15-week sessions each year; they give eight concerts in May and another eight each December. Their performing venues include the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Encore Creativity for Older Adults also runs 206 camps for singers at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York and at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and a dance-and-movement program in Arlington, Virginia. Most recently, Kelly launched a singing program designed for residents of assisted-living facilities. “I hated the idea of assisted living being a real dead end, especially artistically,” she says. “Many people are there because of mobility problems, and the program has had excellent results.”

“This post is republished with permission from Music After 50 (http://www.musicafter50.com), where it first appeared.”

Mark Miller writes the nationally syndicated newspaper column “Retire Smart,” and publishes Retirement Revised, featured recently in Money Magazine as one of the web’s top retirement planning sites. This article is excerpted with permission from Mark’s new book, “The Hard Times Guide to Retirement Security” (Bloomberg Press, June 2010).

The Music Instinct by Philip BallScience can’t explain why we value music so highly, says Guy Dammann. But it’s part of what makes us human

Music for all: a Baluba man performs near Dundo, Angola. Photograph: Volkmar K. Wentzel/National Geographic/Getty Images

In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker laid down the evolutionary-psychological law about music. “Music,” he put it, “is auditory cheesecake.” For those who avoid cheesecake, whether administered orally or aurally, he added: music is “a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest … to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once”.

Those taking umbrage at Pinker’s cheesecake quip fell into two opposing camps. On the side of evolutionary science, many thought he had simply failed to grasp the nettle: since it is indisputably the case that humankind in some sense needs music, there must be an evolutionary account that explains this need along the lines attempted by Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. On the side of the humanities, Pinker had gone wrong in appearing to trivialise music simply because science, rather like all British governments since Thatcher, proved unable to offer a convincing explanation as to why we should value it.

Understandably, some people took against this remark. Humanity accords cheesecake (and even recreational drugs) a certain respect, but to equate them with music? A universal element of human culture that is at the same time unknown in animal societies, music seems to reach to the very core of what it means to be human. The sense of communal identity in many tribal societies is built and maintained through musical activity, while the average western citizen allows music a role in his or her sense of individual identity vastly more formative than any other art form.

Music has been understood as lying at the origins of distinctively human culture – or at the heart of our attempt at self-definition – for centuries. In the 18th century, both Condillac and Rousseau identified music, alongside language, as separating man from animal, substituting biblical legends of the fall of man with something both more secular and optimistic. Indeed, Rousseau went so far as to suggest that music’s importance lay precisely in offering alienated modern man a kind of spiritual link with his less depraved ancestors. Since then, of course, Darwinian accounts of man’s ascent have flourished, but it is only recently that advances in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionarypsychology have suggested the possibility of providing scientific answers to the question of why the play of abstract sounds should have become something, in Philip Ball’s phrase, “we can’t do without”.

Ball is an award-winning popular science writer. His “biography” of water stands as an exemplar among the glut of synecdochic histories of this kind, and the more recent Universe of Stone, about the cathedral at Chartres, succeeds admirably in communicating to its readers the same sense of wonder that allowed medieval minds to conjure heaven in stone and glass.

His latest book is exemplary for different reasons. While the title obviously nods in the direction of Pinker’s book The Language Instinct, his method is much more modest, taking the form of a survey of current knowledge and, more importantly, its limits.

Much as in a primer in the old-fashioned sense, Ball flits between rudimentary briefings on chords, scales and sound-waves, to accounts offered by scientists, philosophers, musicologists and (for once) musicians themselves, trading narratives against each other rather than sculpting a grand one of his own. Popular songs are used to label theories: the theory that music is instrumental in group selection and survival is advanced under the banner of the New Seekers’ “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”, while the “Ronettes theory” (”Be My Baby”) covers the idea that adult musicality is an extension of the process of cognitive stimulation that begins with the sounds mothers (historically) and fathers (more and more) make to soothe and excite their infant offspring. The pace is kept fast throughout, with pull-out boxes to fill knowledge gaps where necessary – useful even for specialist readership: though a professional writer on music myself, I have somehow managed to get by without bothering to learn how the human ear works.

Despite its breezy tone, The Music Instinct’s greatest virtue consists in conveying the impression that answers to genuine questions about music won’t come to anyone in too much of a hurry. Music, after all, is something we spend time engaged in playing, listening to, studying, practising and loving. Indeed, it is the necessarily temporal structure of musical experience, and the way that musical “ideas” cannot be reduced to instantly communicable concepts, that guarantees its importance to us.

We do not love music because it exercises our brains or makes us more attractive to members of the opposite sex, but because we have lived with it since we came into being: it is entwined in our common and individual consciousness to the extent that, simply put, we would not be ourselves without it. In contemplating the mysteries of music we are also thereby contemplating the mystery of ourselves. Because of this, easy answers tend to be irrelevant. Ball, thankfully, doesn’t try to provide any, but rather sends the reader back to the music a better listener.

Guy Dammann lectures on music and philosophy at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Source: Guardian

Thursday, March 04, 2010 

Music’s healing powers in treatment Category: Music The hope of music’s healing powers Music may be an effective balm for many other afflictions: conditions such as autism and Alzheimer’s disease, the disability that results from stroke or the physical stress of entering the world too early.(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times) By Melissa Healy March 1, 2010  Yes, yes, it hath charms to soothe a savage breast (or beast, if you prefer to repeat a common mistake). But researchers are finding that music may be an effective balm for many other afflictions: the isolation of conditions such as autism and Alzheimer’s disease, the disability that results from stroke, the physical stress of entering the world too early. The hope of music’s curative powers has spawned a community in the United States of some 5,000 registered music therapists, who have done post-college study in psychology and music to gain certification. Active primarily in hospitals, nursing homes, special needs classrooms and rehabilitation units, music therapists aim to soothe, stimulate and support the development or recovery of abilities lost to illness or injury. While music therapists use a mix of improvisation and proven techniques to help patients, neuroscientists are looking to uncover the scientific basis for music’s healing powers. They are trying to understand how music can help rewire a brain affected by illness or injury, or provide a work-around for injured or underperforming brain regions. By doing so, they hope to better identify which patients might respond best to music and what musical techniques might best help them to regain lost or compromised function. “Music might provide an alternative entry point” to the brain, because it can unlock so many different doors into an injured or ill brain, said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, a Harvard University neurologist. Pitch, harmony, melody, rhythm and emotion — all components of music — engage different regions of the brain. And many of those same regions are also important in speech, movement and social interaction. If a disease or trauma has disabled a brain region needed for such functions, music can sometimes get in through a back door and coax them out by another route, Schlaug says. “In a sense, we’re using musical tools to particularly engage certain parts of the brain and then teach the brain new tricks — new tools — to overcome an impairment,” he says. Neuroscientists are exploring the role of music in treatment of some of the following: Speech: For about 1 in 5 patients who suffer a stroke, difficulty with speech — aphasia — is a lingering effect. Schlaug and other researchers have found that by practicing to express themselves with a simple form of singing — something that sounds almost like Gregorian chant — aphasic stroke victims significantly improved the fluency of their speech compared with patients whose speech therapy did not include singing. Schlaug says it appears that the “melodic intonation therapy,” as it’s termed, bypassed the stroke damage done to speech centers in aphasic patients’ left brain hemisphere. Instead, it engaged and recruited areas of their healthy right hemispheres that were capable of — though not generally used for — word acquisition and speech. The patients tapped along as they sang, which also seemed to engage a broad network in the brain involved in detecting and reproducing rhythm. Such strategies, it turned out, allowed aphasics’ words to come out. Movement: If you’re old enough, recall John Travolta walking down the street to the song “Stayin’ Alive” in the opening scene of “Saturday Night Fever.” Now imagine a patient with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative brain condition that affects the initiation and smooth completion of movement. Here’s where music’s rhythmic qualities appear to get in the back door of a patient’s brain and provide a work-around to brain functions degraded by Parkinson’s. By engaging the network of regions that perceive and anticipate rhythm, music with a steady, predictable beat can be used to cue the brain’s motor regions to initiate walking. Once off the dime, a Parkinson’s patient can use the music’s beat to maintain a steady, rhythmic gait, like John Travolta. “It works well and it works instantaneously, and it’s hard to think of any medication that has this effect,” Schlaug says. Neuroscientists suspect that music may work in much the same way for stutterers, who can experience difficulties initiating speech and maintaining a steady flow of words. Case studies have long observed that when stutterers sing, their halting speech patterns disappear. Music’s predictable beats may help them initiate speech and continue fluently. Reading: Research suggests that people with dyslexia, or difficulty reading, also fare poorly on tests of auditory processing. Their timing is also poor. They have difficulty filtering out unwanted background noise and “tuning in” to sounds — such as a teacher’s instruction — that they want to hear. Intensive music instruction has been found to improve those skills, and with them, some skills related to reading. Memory: The progressive degeneration of memory in Alzheimer’s disease cannot be reversed or slowed by any intervention. But music can temporarily unlock memories for patients who have lost their grip on nearly every other detail of their daily life and relationships. Patients in the depths of Alzheimer’s and other dementias regularly respond to — and even play and sing — music from their distant past, without missing a word or a note. Nursing homes have seized upon that fact, exposing residents to the songs of their childhoods or courtship years to help reunite spouses in dancing and singing and try to coax dementia sufferers from their isolation. One study even found that dementia patients allowed to punch a button on a robot and hear a familiar song experienced improved mood, function and performance on musical memory games. Preemies’ weight gain: An Israeli study, published December in the journal Pediatrics, found that playing Mozart quietly in neonatal intensive care units supported the weight gain of premature infants by slowing their rate of energy expenditure. Babies exposed over two days to 30 minutes of music (drawn from, yes, an Israeli “Mozart for Baby” CD) slowed their metabolisms, helping to accelerate their growth.   Source: LA Times