Renée Fleming and Francis Collins discuss the transformative power of music — socially and scientifically — Monday in the Amphitheater for the Chautauqua Lecture Series.
Years of performing all around the world have given soprano Reneé Fleming a front-row seat to how audiences react to the power of music — the responses are profound, emotional. Now, there’s a growing body of research that demonstrates a very real connection art can have to a person’s well-being across their entire lifespan.
“Music plays a part in our history, for social cohesion, for bringing us together,” Fleming said Monday morning in the Amphitheater, opening a week for the Chautauqua Lecture Series dedicated to “Exploring the Transformative Power of Music with Reneé Fleming.” “We know now more than in my lifetime just how tribal we are, and it’s part of our DNA.”
Fleming and Collins perform the hymn “How Can I Keep from Singing?”
Experiences like those that happen every day at Chautauqua, of art and music, “contribute to your sense of wellness, health in general, and feeling that you belong,” Fleming said.
Fleming gave a brief solo presentation before being joined on stage by Dr. Francis Collins, her partner in the Sound Health initiative and the former director of the National Institutes of Health. The two discussed their work together and the developments being made in science that tell us what we’ve perhaps known all along — just how important music is to our well-being.
In the field of arts in health, research pillars include childhood development, aging, creative aging and disorders of aging both, chronic pain, mental health, wellness and basic science, Fleming said. To quickly demonstrate the innate, biological nature that music has, she played a quick video of Snowball the cockatoo, dancing his heart out to Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Snowball made up all of the dance moves on his own, and looking at how non-human animals respond to music is part of Ani Patel’s research, which he’ll present Friday in the Amp, in what those responses can teach scientists about human evolution.
“Music and arts are a human invariant, predating recorded human history — that means it’s been in every single culture throughout time,” Fleming said. The bone flute dates back 40,000 years; visual arts even further, at 100,000 years.
Music likely predates speech itself, and exposure to music and rhythm “is especially helpful early in life, and bonding with children is essential for their health, development and survival,” Fleming said. Lullabies, for example, exist in every culture. And as children grow older, those who study musical instruments develop language faster.
Even just listening to music creates endorphins — natural opioids, Fleming said, which could lead to insights on better pain-management practices. When a friend suffered a brain bleed, the only thing that alleviated her pain, Fleming said, “was Jimi Hendrix, as loud as she could play it.”
FMRIs showed that yes, this works — now, the question science is trying to answer is “why.”
The benefits of creative arts therapies are numerous, and Fleming continued with her examples: rhythm and music can help treat movement disorders; the arts can have cardiorespiratory benefits for patients with cardiovascular diseases — “the athletic nature of singing improves endothelial function” — and music and memory are powerfully connected, in ways that can slow the onset and progression of dementia.
“The last few years have seen significant progress on funding, on research and advocacy for this field,” Fleming said. “The World Health Organization is building global support for arts and health, and the NIH has already provided $35 million in funding for research in the U.S.”
Around the world, public arts prescription programs are growing, she said, because more and more people are recognizing the potential for cost savings, and how quality of life can be improved, through the arts.
Welcoming Collins onto the Amp for their conversation portion of the morning presentation, Fleming reminisced about how the two met — at a dinner party, shortly after the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalizing gay marriage. The evening was notable for its attendees — including Justices Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy.
And Collins, Fleming said, brought his guitar.
“It’s a tradition because I grew up with music and it always feels like music would be a good thing, especially at a slightly tense dinner party,” Collins said.
When things got tense, Fleming said to him, “let’s sing together.”
Collins’ Puccini repertoire on guitar was a bit limited, he joked, and the two wound up singing the British folk song “The Water is Wide.” All of the tension in the room melted away. The evening of folk songs continued, and Fleming took the opportunity in front of her.
She’d just been appointed adviser-at-large to the Kennedy Center, and she asked Collins what scientists were studying and learning about music.
It was a perfect moment, Collins said, “to try to see what we can do to bring together music therapy, performers and music and neuroscientists to try to understand how this actually works in the human brain. We all know that experience can be extremely powerful.”
“As I told Renée, there’s a huge amount of interest scientifically in this area,” Collins said, and the two have been working together ever since.
Fleming and Collins discussed his work at the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative, and the science of “understanding how those 86 billion neurons between your ears do what they do,” as Collins put it.
“This is the most complicated structure in the known universe,” he said — how does music, “as an input, affect that?” More importantly, how can that information be used therapeutically?
Music — from listening to playing — utilizes many different parts of the brain, and Fleming helped illustrate that herself when she volunteered to both listen to, and sing, music while lying for two hours in an MRI machine.
With Fleming and the Kennedy Center, and Collins and the NIH, partnered with support from the National Endowment of the Arts, ideas began to percolate, Collins said. And with Fleming’s ability to convey the excitement of this work, Collins said, their joint effort has garnered $36 million in NIH research that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.
“It’s a whole lot of different projects focused on many different issues, but it still feels like it’s just on the leading edge of building into something even more significant,” Collins said. “That’s what I love about this project — when you bring together disciplines that previously didn’t really talk to each other, that may not even quite understand each other’s language … that’s when science goes forward the fastest.”
By far, Fleming said, the NIH is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world. This research helps scientists understand “how health happens, how disease can occur and what to do about it,” Collins said.
In researching the brain, this means following an idea along the lines of “somebody with a stroke may benefit with this (arts therapy) intervention,” he said. You don’t know if an idea will work unless a study’s been designed, and then conducted rigorously. This is what the NIH is assisting with, reaching out to music researchers with a “toolkit,” as Collins described it, helping them with designing studies with appropriate controls and measurements.
“In the past, I think a lot of what’s been done with music interventions for human medical conditions hasn’t had that same level of rigor,” he said. “What I think we also really need to see, is to have this kind of intervention seen as so beneficial that it would actually be paid for by an organization like medicare and third-party insurance.”
Currently, only 12 states in the country offer licensure to music therapists and creative arts therapies — beyond just music, Fleming said. Increasing that number would be helpful, especially in re-creating a pipeline for arts educators in public schools.
Some of the research supported by Collins, Fleming and the NIH covers topics like how the acoustic cortex converts soundwaves into electricity (and what that could mean for epilepsy) and what music and rhythm therapy can do for people with Parkinson’s disease.
To keep this work going, Collins said, “we need an even larger critical mass of people working on this who are equally at home with neuroscience and music therapy and can figure out how to advance this at an even faster pace.”
To this end, the Neuroarts Investigator Awards offer grants and the opportunity for institutions to connect with young faculty across disciplines, and developments in artificial intelligence to consolidate and analyze data are a “boon” to medical research, Collins said, “especially when you’re tied in with neuroscience and the ability to really measure what’s happening in the brain as somebody is undergoing music therapy for a particular condition — you can see what lit up when it worked and what didn’t when it didn’t work.”
As this research continues, and new breakthroughs are made, Collins said, it’s not just a person’s lifespan that can improve, but their healthspan. Music has the ability to relieve “much of our suffering,” he said, and pointed to a surgical procedure he had three months ago. It wasn’t Jimi Hendrix that helped, as was the case with Fleming’s friend, but James Taylor. And when James Taylor wasn’t cutting it, Collins started playing Bach’s Preludes, and organ music. Turn that music all the way up, he quipped, “and you can’t possibly focus on anything else.”
Collins’ father was trained as a classical violinist, but became a folksong collector, traveling around North Carolina in the late 1930s with a recorder, knocking on people’s doors with a bottle of bourbon “as a peace offering,” and asking whoever answered to share the songs they knew from their parents and grandparents. Almost 100 years later, in the Library of Congress, “you will find 235 songs in the American folk collection that were submitted by my father, Fletcher Collins.”
Music, as Fleming said at the outset, “plays a part in our history, for social cohesion, for bringing us together.” This is evident in Fletcher Collins’ folk song collection, and the health benefits of music is becoming more and more evident in the work championed by Fleming and his son, Francis. Taken together, music as social cohesion and music as therapy can “humanize healthcare.”
“In the near future,” Fleming said in closing, “I would really like a commercial to come on television saying ask your doctor if music therapy is right for you. Symptoms may include ear worms. And we’re getting there.”
