1. Turn on the Music at home.  Sometimes we get so busy and caught up in the things we have to do, we don’t even take a minute to walk over to the stereo and turn it on. Try it in the morning when you’re getting ready for your day or getting the kids off to school. Try it in the afternoon when you need to get yourself moving again in the office and you are trying to resist yet another cup of coffee! And at the end of the day, when you just want to put up your feet for 3 minutes, put on your favorite go-to song to help de-stress and relax your body.

2. Have a favorite song stuck in your head? Give it another few minutes of thought… Why is that song in your head at this moment? What are the lyrics? What is the theme or mood of the song? When is the last time you heard that song played? Taking a moment to discover why this song has presented itself is a wonderful opportunity for introspection.

3. Music for Childbirth – Music is an effective pain management tool for labor and delivery. It’s one of the areas in which I want to do a lot more work! I have consulted with expectant parents about what music to use in labor and delivery, how to choose the best songs for you and tips and tricks for using music in the hospital. If you are expecting a new little one, or know someone who is, think about how much can make labor and delivery an incredibly pleasant and joyful experience! People don’t believe me, but I love childbirth and it’s because of the great associations I have with the music I listened to for each labor.

4. Lolo iPod/iPhone apps – Do you ever get stuck on the treadmill or the elliptical struggling to get through a workout? I have discovered the coolest music and workout application. It uses an incredible beat-sync technology that takes your favorite tunes, analyzes the beats per minute in the song and then uses that at appropriate times in the work out to get your body moving! Lolo is so cool, it can even speed up and slow down your tunes to match the workout exactly, without losing the pitch of the songs. Intervals at the gym are finally enjoyable with your favorite tunes speeding up and slowing you down. This is an amazing use of music and technology to increase your physical activity.

As a Music and Psychology student at Northeastern University, I chose to co-op at Roman Music Therapy Services to gain experience in the field of music therapy. I was interested in learning more about the psychological benefits of music and how it can be used in a clinical setting. Roman Music Therapy Services taught me all this and so much more.

I helped music therapist Kari O’Briant with drop-off program Music Makers, aided Meredith at the Melrose Public Library’s “Rockin’ Babies and Boppin’ Toddlers,” and supported the music therapists at various community music events.  Roman Music Therapy Services provided me with opportunities to observe both individual and group sessions in various settings. To help determine what population I would be most interested in working with, I observed clients on both ends of the age spectrum. I sat in on early childhood Sprouting Melodies classes, an EMARK group for children with disabilities, music therapy groups at a Lynn Middle School, and a nursing home session. With this wide variety of experience, I have been able to see music therapy in action and can now attest to its positive effects.

In addition to my involvement with music therapy, I have been working as an office assistant at the Roman Music Therapy Services center and gift boutique.  My responsibilities included website upkeep, social media maintenance, preparing marketing materials, creating and distributing printed flyers, writing blog posts, and assisting with the electronic newsletter.  My organizational skills and ability to prioritize were greatly improved by this co-op, as were my communication skills. I also became fluent in number of new software programs.

One of my favorite parts of my co-op experience here was the work environment. Because of the healing nature of their profession, the Roman Music Therapy Services staff creates a very pleasant office atmosphere. The music therapists and office manager are very friendly, optimistic people who make working in the office enjoyable. I found that the children and families who come through the center are always smiling, eager to participate in music classes and reap the benefits.

Today is the last day of my co-op.  I will be returning to classes at Northeastern next semester to continue my studies in music and psychology. Overall, this was an incredibly positive experience. It provided me with rich learning opportunities in the fields of business, marketing, and communications and was also a catalyst for personal growth. Meredith Pizzi was a fabulous and nurturing mentor who provided me with feedback and suggestions that I will carry into my school work and future career. My co-op at Roman Music Therapy Services is a great resume builder and was crucial in aiding my transition from college to the working world.  I can definitely see myself pursuing a career in music therapy and hope to rejoin the Roman Music Therapy Services team at some point in the future!

View this Press Release on Melrose Patch and in the Melrose Free Press.

Melrose, Massachusetts October 6, 2011 – Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence, the leading national not-for-profit provider of resources, business education, and community support for women entrepreneurs, has named Meredith Roman Pizzi of Malden as one of 44 Pitch Winners selected in the latest Make Mine a Million $ Business event, M3 1000, which was held Monday, September 26, 2011 in Philadelphia, PA.

M3 1000 is the largest business pitch competition for women in the United States. The Philadelphia event featured more than 300 women entrepreneurs from across the nation pitching their businesses, participating in business growth education sessions, and building business opportunities with each other.

Described as a cross between “The Apprentice” and “American Idol,” the M3 1000 pitch competition invites women business owners with at least $85,000 in annual business revenues that have been in business for two years or more to present their business in a two minute “elevator pitch” to a panel of small business experts and judges. Pitch Winners came away with a $1000 American Express gift card, an introductory cycle of professional coaching from The Coach Connection (TCC), and a chance to participate in the next round of competition to win a coveted spot in the renowned Make Mine a Million $ Business program, along with a business development package that includes additional cycles of coaching, national PR, and financing assistance to help their businesses grow into million-dollar enterprises. A complete list of M3 1000 Philadelphia pitch winners can be found at http://makemineamillion.org/features/M3-1000-Philadelphia.

Meredith Roman Pizzi of Malden, MA is the local winner of the M3 1000 competition. After hearing Meredith’s two minute pitch, Nell Merlino, the founder of Count Me In, said, “You have a very important business and there are many people who need you!” She has been a Board Certified Music Therapist for 7 years. A graduate of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA, Pizzi has always been passionate about music and chose to pursue music therapy to help others using music. Beginning originally with the trumpet in fifth grade, Meredith continued studying piano, guitar, and voice in her music therapy training. In addition to her musical background, Pizzi also has an affinity for business. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Roman Music Therapy Services, a music therapy agency providing music therapy services for young children, children and adults with disabilities, and the elderly. Meredith also developed Sprouting Melodies, an early childhood program focused on development and growth through participation in music. Sprouting Melodies is looking to sprout up soon in other Boston communities. Meredith’s passion for music therapy and serving others has been the driving force behind the growth of Roman Music Therapy Services. She resides in Malden with her husband, Felix, and their three children.

Launched in 2005 by Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence and founding partner American Express OPEN, the Make Mine a Million $ Business program was created to help post-start up, women-owned businesses grow to one million dollars in annual revenue. Since its inception, the program has hosted over 20 competitions in cities around the country with thousands of women entrepreneurs participating, and grown into a nationwide movement. To date more than 28% of Make Mine a Million $ Business program participants have surpassed the $1 million mark in annual revenues versus the 2.6% national average for women business owners. A year-to-date investment of $12 million in the program has yielded $160 million in revenues for Make Mine a Million $ Business Awardees. The ultimate goal of the program is to elevate one million women businesses to over $1M in annual revenue generating $1 trillion in revenues and creating over 4 million jobs by 2020.

“We are thrilled by the eagerness of women across the country to grow their businesses, create jobs in their communities, and create stability for their families and the national economy,” said Nell Merlino, Founder and President of Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence.”

About Count Me In and Roman Music Therapy Services

Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence is the leading national not-for-profit provider of resources, business education, and community support for women entrepreneurs seeking to grow their businesses to million dollar enterprises. Count Me In launched the Make Mine a Million $ Business Competition to inspire one million women entrepreneurs scale their businesses to a million dollars in business revenues in the next decade by providing tools, skills, and the support of a nation-wide community of peers.

Roman Music Therapy Services was founded in 2006 by Meredith Roman Pizzi, MT-BC as a private practice. Today with a team of four Board Certified music therapists, Roman Music Therapy Services is making huge strides and asserting itself as Massachusetts’ premier music therapy agency. In addition to their community work, Roman Music Therapy Services a childhood program, “Sprouting Melodies,” and individual and group clinical sessions at their center on Main Street in Melrose. Our music therapists use the power of music to motivate and engage clients to meet their full potential. Roman Music Therapy Services plans to scale the business by increasing their services to daycares and preschool programs, special education programs and nursing homes and assisted living communities in the Greater Boston and Eastern Massachusetts area. There are also plans to expand Sprouting Melodies to other communities in the South Shore and Metrowest areas.

Check out our new and improved Sprouting Melodies logo! You will be seeing this more and more around town in future months. Roman Music Therapy Services is growing, and we thought it would be appropriate for our graphic designs to be updated as well.  Please feel free to email us with your comments and feedback at help@romanmusictherapy.com.

Music’s effect on the human brain begins weeks before birth.  Because the ability to hear is developed inside the womb, babies can hear sounds prior to exposure to the outside world.  The soft timbre of a mother’s voice is one of the first recognizable noises a child hears.  The child associates this sound with comfort,  and will continue to remember and identify the mother’s voice as such after birth.  This same concept may be applied to music.  Any sort of musical sounds that a child is exposed to while in the womb— such as songs sung by the mother, musical instruments played by the mother, or music in the mother’s particular surrounding environment— may be remembered by the child and effect their progress (Hepper & Shahidullah, 1994). Though early exposure to music can not be proven to impact human brain development, research has been conducted on rats that seem to validate this hypothesis.  Rats exposed in utero plus sixty days postpartum to the Mozart sonata (K.448) navigated a spatial maze faster and with fewer errors than did animals exposed to minimalist music, white noise, or silence (Rauscher & Shaw, 1998).  Thus, it is quite possible that neural processes are effected by exposure to music, but there is not enough evidence to fully support this claim.

One could then further this question by asking, does listening to music through various stages of development (preschool years, middle to late childhood) have any impact?  More studies have been conducted regarding childhood listening; more specifically, a phenomenon coined “the Mozart effect.”  Explored by psychologists Frances Rauscher and Gordon Shaw, the “Mozart effect” suggests that listening to classical music may create short-term improvement in mental processes known as spatial-temporal reasoning.  The results of this study however, were largely misinterpreted by the public, who falsely began believing that “listening to music makes kids smarter.”  While Rauscher and Gordon did observe improvements on abstract spatial reasoning tests after the children were primed with a Mozart sonata, these positive effects lasted no longer than fifteen minutes.  Because there was no brain alteration and the effects were temporary, the Mozart effect can not be credited with improving IQ or creating lasting change (Rauscher, Gordon, & Ky, 1993).

Although listening to music may not be directly linked to brain development, there have been studies to prove playing music might be.  The act of playing an instrument involves motor skills, coordination, and complex mathematical processing, as well as psychological/emotional skills such as patience, determination, and self-expression.  Musical training can assist a child’s development in the school environment specifically in the departments of mathematics and language.  Understanding note values, counting out rhythms, and being able to keep a steady meter all involve uses of mathematical concepts; interpreting positions of notes on the staff and meanings of various musical symbols of embellishment parallels to reading a different language.  Students are able to apply these concepts to their school work.  In addition, reading music and playing an instrument can increase a child’s creativity, memory, and sense of self-worth (Schlaug, Norton, Overy, & Winner, 2005.)

In order to prove the influence of instrumental training on cognitive brain development, Gottfried Schaug, Andrea Norton, Katie Overy, and Ellen Winner conducted experiments on groups of children (fifty in total) between the ages of five and seven and between the ages of nine and eleven.  Each child in the five to seven-year-old category had no previous musical background; half of them would take lessons for a year, the others would not.  Children took several behavioral and intelligence tests prior to beginning music lessons (including the Object Assembly, Block Design, and Vocabulary subtests from either the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III) (for children six years and older) or the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI-III) (for children under age six); the Raven’s Colored Progressive Matrices (CPM) and Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM); the Auditory Analysis Test as a measure of phonemic awareness; Gordon’s Primary Measures of Music Audiation (PMMA) as a measure of musical skill/aptitude; and two motor tests to measure speed and dexterity in both right and left hands).  They also underwent structural and functional MRI brain scans.  A year later, the same tests were taken, revealing improvements among the musical participants.  No significant change was noted among the non-musical control group.  In the nine to eleven-year-old study, researchers compared children with four years of musical experience to a group of non-instrumentalists.  Musical children scored higher on some of the tests— specifically fine motor skills and auditory discrimination skills— but showed no notable differences on standard IQ tests.  The instrumentalists did, however, have significantly more gray matter volume pronounced in the sensorimotor cortex and the occipital lobe bilateral.  (Schlaug, Norton, Overy, & Winner, 2005.)

Schlaug, Norton, Overy, and Winner also performed cross-sectional studies among nonmusical versus musical adults, finding “significantly more gray matter in several brain regions, including the primary sensorimotor cortex, the adjacent superior premotor and anterior superior parietal cortex, primary auditory cortex, the cerebellum, the inferior frontal gyrus, and part of the lateral inferior temporal lobe” of the musicians. (Schlaug, Norton, Overy, & Winner, 2005.)

Despite the results of Schlaug, Norton, Overy, and Winner’s experiment, other researchers still claim that there is not enough solid evidence on this topic.  The construct validity of the test can be disputed due to subject variables— variables that characterize pre-existing differences among study participants.  Psychologists argue that the brains of subjects who undertake and persist in music lessons might originally differ from those who have no interest or do not have the persistence to continue lessons.  Statistics also show that the typical piano student comes from a white, middle-upper class, and thus privileged environment (Costa-Giomi, 1999).  Because of this, these children tend to have more involved and encouraging parents, as well as the opportunity to attend better schools.  Therefore, though studies show a correlation between musical lessons and intelligence, there is no evidence that music is the causation.

Various studies have demonstrated the positive effects of both listening and playing music on brain development. These effects include improved visual-spatial, linguistic, and mathematical performance, in addition to increased memory, emotional development, and self-esteem.  Structural and functional differences in the brains of adult musicians compared to adult non-musicians have also been observed.  The contributions of nature and nurture to this phenomenon are not yet clear, however.  Psychologists debate whether or not these experimental results are predispositional or due to other factors such as instructional methods, environment, and parenting.

References

Rauscher, F. & Shaw, G. (1998). Key Components of the Mozart Effect. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 86, 835-841. Retrieved from http://www.uwosh.edu/departments/psychology/rauscher/Key.pdf

Schlaug, G., Norton, A., Overy, K., & Winner, E. (2005). Effects of Music Training on the Child’s Brain and Cognitive Development. The Neurosciences and Music II: From Perception to Performance, 1060, 219-230. doi: 10.1196/annals.1360.015

Costa-Giomi, E. (1999). The Effects of Three Years of Piano Instruction on Children’s Cognitive Development. Journal of Research in Music Education, 47, 198-212. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3345779

Hepper, P. & Shahidullah, S. (1994).  Development of Fetal Hearing. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 71, F81-F87.  Retrieved from http://www.realpeacework-akademie.info/graz/e/eScience/music.pdf

Overall the Victorian Fair was a great success for everyone involved and most definitely achieved its promotional goals.  Dozens of spaces were filled in this week’s Sprouting Melodies trial classes, and countless pamphlets and flyers were circulated.  We hope that you enjoyed your time there, and if you weren’t able to make it we hope to see you next year!

Our instructor, Rose, began our training talking about CPR.  Recently, several changes have been made to the American Heart Association’s methods of dealing with crisis situations of a person in cardiac arrest.  Instead of the typical mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, new policies state that it is more beneficial if CPR is used immediately until help arrives.  Statistics show that mouth-to-mouth is not as effective as the constant, frequent pushes to the heart delivered by CPR.  In addition, the American Heart Association recommends only taking the pulse once, if at all.  During a crisis situation, a person may be flustered and anxious and could mistake their pulse for that of the victim’s.  Too much time is wasted searching for a spot to take the pulse and the effort to feel it when the focus should be on immediate CPR.  If the person is indeed alive and pulsating, they will be sure to let you know.

After the discussion, Rose brought out adult and child manikins for us to practice our new knowledge.  We each got a turn– falling to our knees, tapping the “person” inquiring if they were alright, pretending to call 9-1-1, and then beginning to administer CPR.  For one minute, each of us gave our victims 100 thrusts, 2 inches deep.  It is surprising how long that minute drags on, and how sore your hands and arms become after only thirty seconds.  With the rapid beat of the pushes (at the same tempo as the song “Stayin’ Alive”– a funny little pun that Rose introduced us to), one tires quickly.  In the case of a real emergency, the CPR must be kept up at this steady beat until medical assistance arrives.

The next step in our program was to learn how to properly use a defibrillator.  Never having attended a First Aid course before, I was unsure and intimidated by the AED.  Though having seen them in various locations throughout the city (gyms, schools, etc.), I had no idea how to use one, or if I was even certified to.  Many people ponder this very same question, and the answer is this: AED’s are not restricted to medical personal.  If you are at a scene where a person goes into cardiac arrest, you have the right (and the obligation) to use a nearby defibrillator. Actual usage is simple enough– turn on the AED, place the two pads on the person’s chest and stomach, right over left (diagrams are shown on the pads themselves), plug in the cord, and the AED will talk you through the rest.  Our team divided into groups of three and practiced on the manikins– an activity that was both anxiety provoking yet comical at the same time.

For the next two hours, we discussed other possible emergencies and how to deal with them.  Having a First Aid kit on hand at all times is very important, we learned.  Rose also taught us that in most situations, calling 9-1-1 is the first action one should take.  This should be instinctive for most adults; however, sometimes in a state of emergency and panic, it is easy to forget.  We went over packets on First Aid essentials and practiced the Heimlich Maneuver (to be used in case of choking) for the reminder of the class period.

After a long morning, we were all finally First Aid certified.  Now we are prepared to deal with any sort of emergency that may rise during our work on and off site.  Your kids will be safe with us!

Where Our Music Therapists Work:

• schools
• homes
• centers
• hospitals
• hospices
• recreation programs
• libraries
• rehab
• dayhabs
• assisted living
• preschools
• early intervention
• senior centers

“One of my parents’ deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn’t be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother’s remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said, “you’re wasting your SAT scores!” On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren’t really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the “arts and entertainment” section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it’s the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for the prisoners and guards of the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-even from the concentration camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn’t just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, “I am alive, and my life has meaning.”

In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn’t this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn’t shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn’t play cards to pass the time, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang “We Shall Overcome”. Lots of people sang America the Beautiful. The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can’t with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heart wrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

Very few of you have ever been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but with few exceptions there is some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there’s some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn’t good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can’t talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn’t happen that way. The Greeks. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I’ll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Midwestern town a few years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland’s Sonata, which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland’s, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70′s, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: “During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team’s planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn’t understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?”

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year’s freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

“If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you’d take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you’re going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don’t expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that’s what we do. As in the Nazi camps and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives.”