A World of Sound: Cultural Diversity in BCH’s Music Therapy Programs
We are so excited to share an update on the grant we received from the BCH Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Anti-Racism (DEI/AR) Council. With these funds we were able to bring in musicians from three diverse cultures and music genres to perform for patients and families and teach our staff. Here are some of the highlights:
Nathalia Palis is a musician, music therapist, and educator with expertise in bilingual music in Spanish and English. We work with so many families for whom Spanish is their primary language, and are always looking to increase our resources to best connect and work with them. During Nathalia’s workshop, I can confidently say I learned more repertoire of songs in Spanish than ever before in my 11 years as a music therapist. We also looked at styles of music across different countries and regions, and ways to use bilingual songs.
Nathalia’s performance was full of joy, energy, and enthusiasm. Patients played, sang, and danced. You can learn more about Nathalia here.
Melody Liu is a music therapist who very kindly zoomed with us very early in the morning from China. She taught us about the guzheng, a traditional Chinese string instrument, and how she has used it in music therapy. The guzheng is an incredibly versatile instrument in terms of timbre and sounds it can create, and Melody demonstrated how many Chinese instruments evoke imagery in songs.
Wenying Wu and John Chiang from Ai Music joined us for a beautiful performance of traditional Chinese music. All of our concert attendees said that they learned or saw something new. Half of them saw their own culture represented, and others a culture that was new to them. You can learn more about Ai Music here.
Rohan Krishnamurthy is an Indian-American percussionist, composer, and educator. During our workshop he taught us some of the foundations of traditional Indian music and percussion. As music therapists we often use improvisation, and we talked with Rohan about how fundamental improvisation is to much of Indian music. Rohan’s performance included a variety of percussion instruments and invited patients and families to keep a beat along with each one. Many of our patients were still talking about the concert days later. You can learn more about Rohan here.
In total, we had 70 people attend the concerts. In post-concert surveys, all participants said they would like to see more concerts like this in the future!
What comes next? We hope to secure additional funding to bring in more artists and workshops. Do you have ideas for musicians we should reach out to? Are you interested in helping contribute to this ongoing effort to bring in diverse music? Please reach out to Jenny at jennifer.goldhammer@ucsf.edu
