Alive Inside

[JEStanek]

I had seen excerpts from this or similar videos and did the same for my mom as she was dying from her dementia. She was mostly unresponsive in her room but really brightened up when I played her some of her favorite (from a long time ago music). We had run out and purchased Brubeck's Take Five, Mozart's requiem, and a Chieftains CD she knew and loved.

She didn't come fully back but she was much more present. The music tied into so many of her long term memories.

Jamie

[catmandu2]

I also play some nursing homes each month, and have observed the pleasure that music has brought to them. I remember one lady in particular. I watched her for about 30 minutes, and I wondered why the staff had brought a comatose woman to our session. Suddenly, I realized that she was tapping a single finger in time to the music. Now I understood. I later learned that hearing is the last sense to leave us, and all those people who I thought were "unresponsive," really weren't. Four of us played under the window of a friend who was hours away from death. He had lost the ability to communicate, but his wife said that when we started playing, he was tapping his fingers to the beat. I will never again treat a gig in a nursing home lightly.

Music is often used in providing for overtly unresponsive persons - it's a mainstay in hospice practice; often upon my visits the patients are largely unresponsive - it's deemed that appropriate music is highly effective in this setting, when the patient is unable or otherwise indisposed to 'normal' interaction; 'harp vigils' are often provided for persons and their families when death is imminent. In harp therapy practice, it's understood that persons even without ostensible environmental responsivity are typically able to hear, sense, and benefit from sound, vibration, music. Now the approach is frequently implemented in pre- and neo-natal care. These approaches are especially efficacious in wide spectra of habilitative and rehabilitative settings. A very potent medicine.

*Btw, an excellent anthology of writings on this topic is gathered in "Music: physician for times to come" (if i recall the title correctly ). Highly recommended.

[catmandu2]

Here's an article I find inspiring. Among other things, it discusses such possibilities as an "aesthetic gene," and how aesthetic imagination and experience may withstand aging processes to remain essential even in our later years.

https://voices.no/index.php/voices/article/view/862/734

Concerning music in healthcare/LTC settings, etc, in particular, consider:

Art (as in life) is always in the state of becoming...Artists make choices along the way to suspend the process in certain ways, or to develop it – by being present or by being absent – collapsing time, or expanding it. Active or inactive; there, or not there, it has an affect on the space around it, and the ‘the nature of something behaves differently because of it’ (Woodward, 2015). We can see this in the environments in which we work—especially in institutional settings where absence of an aesthetic invites despair, anger, and withdrawal (Woodward, 2004).

[Denny Gies]

Pops got it right. I play at a memory unit and it is amazing to see the lights go on, the lips begin to move and the feet begin to tap to a familiar song. It's very rewarding on both sides of the instrument.