music connects us with people

Music has a wonderful capacity to connect people, whether it’s two people or two thousand and two. Bonds are made between people as we share music together. This can happen through:

• a shared event where a connection is made, like a wedding or concert or dance


• a shared feeling where we resonate around an emotion like joy or grief or love


• a shared idea where the music becomes symbolic like the hook of a jingle or a protest

I remember several years ago how one song made me feel connected to millions of other people around the world. As Sir Elton John sang Candle in the Wind, his words encapsulated a world mourning the life of Diana Princess of Wales. Perhaps it was the connection to human suffering and tragedy, but that song brought us together in our common journey and expressed our common grief.

Music played an important role in my connection with my grandmother, Nanny Gross. As a child, she would come and straighten my shoulders as I practiced. Somehow, this was her way of cheering me on. When I was a music student, she would come to my recitals and be interested in what I was studying and learning. Music was a natural part of our relationship, something that joined us together. Often when I went to see her at the nursing home, I’d wheel her to the piano and play some tunes. During the last five years of her life, Nanny suffered from dementia and music was the means we connected.

Has music connected you with someone in a special way?


Copyright 2010, Bev Foster

lament for haiti

The earthquake in Haiti last week is a catastrophe of epic proportion. The more I read and see, the more my heart feels the loss and sorrow of the people. As I write, two friends, a doctor and a leader in a Haitian mission, have gone to help. They say it is desperate. I feel deep grief: for mothers, grandmothers, orphans, cousins, survivors in Haiti and Haitian Canadian friends who have lost loved ones and the meagre existence they had.

In the past few days, I have received 2 laments for Haiti. A lament is an audible expression of grief and mourning and can be sung. In lament, the hard questions may be posed: like "how long God?" "remember us God" or "where are you Lord?". It may also express the need for healing or mercy, like "In Your mercy, hear our prayer." Laments have been used for centuries as part of mourning rituals and are found in spirituals, tragic opera, gospel songs, blues, ballads, hymns, folk, cinematic music.

The first lament I received is a setting of a Kyrie set to a traditional Haitian tune, arranged and adapted by Andy Donaldson. You can get it at seraph@pathcom.com. The other is a text set to a hymn tune written by a Swiss woman, Kristine Greenaway.

In Haiti there is anguish that seems too much to bear;
A land so used to sorrow now knows even more despair.
From city streets, the cries of grief rise up to hills above;
In all the sorrow, pain and death, where are you, God of love?

A woman sifts through rubble, a man has lost his home,
A hungry, orphaned toddler sobs, for she is now alone.
Where are you, Lord, when thousands die—the rich, the poorest poor?
Were you the very first to cry for all that is no more?

O God, you love your children; you hear each lifted prayer!
May all who suffer in that land know you are present there.
In moments of compassion shown, in simple acts of grace,
May those in pain find healing balm, and know your love’s embrace.

Where are you in the anguish? Lord, may we hear anew
That anywhere your world cries out, you’re there-- and suffering, too.
And may we see, in others’ pain, the cross we’re called to bear;
Send out your church in Jesus’ name to pray, to serve, to share.

The collective traumatic grief may be so paralyzing in Haiti that I wonder if our brothers and sisters are able to sing? So we will sing lamentations joining Haitian brothers and sisters in their suffering, knowing that in some profound way, music has the power to act cathartically, and hoping that one day this nation will rise again to find its voice and sing its song.

Copyright 2010, Bev Foster

music and memory

As a musician, I'm interested in memory because memorizing has been a large part of my craft: large works like sonatas and concerti. I analyze the music into sections and remember it according to numbers or letters. According to neuroscientists, the process I've used is called "chunking", a process of tying together units of information into groups and remembering the group as a whole rather than in individual pieces. I'm also interested in music and memory because my grandmother had dementia and I've observed as a caregiver music brought her some meausre of quality of life in those lonely and uncharted years.

Here are 6 cool facts about music and memory.

1) Music becomes cross-coded with the events of our lives. That is why music is linked to the events in our personal history. One theory suggests that it may be due to the location of where our feelings our processed in proximity to where our memories are tagged for storage in the brain. Music is often a part life events and passage that are lived with emotions - joy, sorrow, excitement, anxiety - and therefore linked to a memory i.e. weddings, school dances, parades, sporting events. No wonder when I hear Sunshine on My Shoulders, I think about a particular time and place with Rob...

2) Music triggers associations through melodic traces and is filtered through schema, the brain's processing framework. Schemas are developed through acculturation and experience as are musical schemas so that when we hear a new musical idiom, our brains try to make an association and contextualize the new sounds creating memory links between a particular set of notes, a particular time and set of events. That explains why East Indian music doesn't come naturally to me. I'm developing schema and trying to process it through a Western musician's ears.

3) Remembering is the process of recruiting the same group of neurons used in perception of an image and pulling them together again. Barriers to memory retrieval may not be about storage, but about the cues to get at the memory. The implications may be that music is a powerful cue to "re-member" neuron groupings. According to another study, music recognition may be spared in Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. I totally see that at the nursing home when I'm doing music with residents - especially with Christmas music.

4) Music may act as a trigger for procedural behaviors. Lullabies may cue babies or young children to sleep. Music with a steady beat may cue exercises like in Pilates or Yoga. Teachers may use music to reinforce behavioral routines such as quiet time, clean up time, circle time. I've used this when I taught in a classroom and with my own children at bedtime. It is fabulous for creating nurturing structures.

5)Music activates areas in both brain hemispheres and this reason alone makes it a viable therapeutic option.Music may be encoded in multiple sites in the brain as well. Reading music may be encoded in semantic memory while automated responses like toe tapping in reflexive memory. General music listening may be stored in our episodic memory. This was new to me, but makes sense with ADRD folks I know where they can't remember what they had for lunch, but can remember 4 verses of a song.

6) Earworms are short musical phrases or segments that get played over and over again in our minds. An earworm is a neural circuit that gets stuck in short term memory and happens mostly with hooks of jingles and simple melodies, and sometimes with tones or words. Such a clever device for musicians to use...

Copyright 2010, Bev Foster