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Welcome
Bev Foster B.Mus, B.Ed, A.R.C.T., A.Mus
Last year, I was with a group of activity professionals who work in long-term residential care on a daily basis. One woman, who had thirty plus years experience, grinned as if she possessed the secret wisdom of eldercare and proclaimed to the whole audience “Music enhances everything”. It made my job easy: I was preaching to the converted. She knew from her years of frontline caregiving that music reaches into all the spaces of life and makes them better.
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The Effects of Music Therapy on the Quality and Length of Life of People Diagnosed with Terminal Cancer
Russell E. Hilliard, PhD, LCSW, LCAT, MT-BC, Executive Director, Seasons Hospice and Palliative Care, Founder, Centers for Music Therapy in End of Life Care
This article has been reprinted with express permission of the author and the American Music Therapy Association. Although music therapists have been working in palliative care and hospice settings, empirical research evaluating the efficacy of music therapy with the terminally ill is exiguous. Palliative care serves to treat symptoms and provide comfort measures in order to respect quality of life, and the curative approach in promoting length of life is forgone. Symptom management can be complex in palliative care as the whole person is considered. Distress in the form of physical, psychological, financial, or spiritual concerns can impact one’s quality of life, and palliative care provides an interdisciplinary team to treat the various forms of distress among the dying. Because music therapy can treat one’s mind, body, and spirit, it has been used as an important component within the interdisciplinary team.
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Music to Shatter the Silence
Amy Clements-Cortes, MusM, MTA, Senior Music Therapist, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, Internship Chair, Canadian Association for Music Therapy, Board of Directors
When Bev asked me to write an article about my clinical work with Holocaust survivors I was grateful for the opportunity to share the importance of the amazing potential music can play in examining feelings and stories from years past. While I had worked with this population for several years, I had not stopped to reflect on my experiences. Writing this paper gave me the opportunity to re-examine my practice and reminisce about the wonderful clients with whom I have worked.
Holocaust survivors can be described as persons of Jewish origin who were “selected” to be exterminated during the period of 1933-1945. These persons lived in war torn Europe, including the Soviet Union, and were: held in concentration, extermination or labour camps; disguised as Christians; in hiding; partisans; or, some combination of these. Survivors witnessed “terror, fear, prolonged starvation, abuse and/or experimentation, confinement and daily exposure to death and human carnage” (Freedman, 1999, p. 167).
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The Power of Listening
Paul Madaule, Director of the Listening Centre, Toronto, Author
Listening plays a fundamental role in the development of communication, language and learning. Listening is often understood as the effect of concentrated effort, as in “pay attention and listen!” In reality, it is the other way around: good attention span is the result of proper listening and listening is effortless. If listening necessitates effort, it indicates that it is not good enough to be sustained for long, leading to short attention span.
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Book Review: Music, Language, and the Brain
Aniruddh D. Patel, Oxford University Press: 2008. 528 pp.
This book is an intellectual tour de force, raising many more issues than recent popular works by, for example, Oliver Sacks and Daniel Levitin. Not one for the bus, beach or bathtub, Music, Language, and the Brain requires focused engagement, but its rewards are rich. Aniruddh Patel offers a thorough analysis of music cognition and its relation to language, and outlines an ambitious and innovative research programme that deepens our understanding of cognition in general.
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Hospice Palliative Care in Sub-Saharan Africa
Part 1 - Overview of Southern Africa
Margaret Van Dyck, RN, BScN, CHPCN
The hospice and palliative care movement in Africa in the modern period started in 1979 with the founding of Island Hospice Service in Zimbabwe. Its founding, like that of many hospices, was spearheaded by several individuals inspired by the UK’s St. Christopher’s Hospice, who shared the vision of meeting the need for palliative care with home-based care and providing relevant training within existing local health care institutions. Since then, but especially during the 1990’s, there has been a mushrooming of local hospices, now numbering over 140 in sub-Saharan Africa, in response to the palliative needs of cancer patients and to the overwhelming needs created by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. To give some perspective: this is one hospice for every five million people; the US has 3,300 hospices, or one for every 82,000 people.(1) Organized palliative care services in Africa have mainly “sprung from the identification of suffering and an urgent need to meet the needs of, initially, cancer patients, and in more recent years, those with HIV/AIDS.”(2) We will focus in this article on southern Africa and in Part 2 will look at East Africa, especially at Hospice Africa (Uganda), a possible model for hospice care in Africa. This brief article cannot possibly do justice to the immensity of the subject. One can refer to the comprehensive appraisal and analysis of palliative care in sub-Saharan Africa compiled by Dr R. Harding and I. Higginson (3)
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Rooms Around the World
Profiles hospices, hospitals, long term care facilities and people using or beginning to use music in therapeutic ways. If your organization would like to be featured in Rooms Around the World send us a picture and share a unique aspect of it with our readers. This issue: The “Joy of Jammin”, Saskatoon Mental Health Music Program
Music: Its Therapeutic Use in Hospice Palliative Care Education
Listening Training: A Program of Sound Stimulation
The Hearing Essay, Dame Evelyn Glennie
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Music Note
Music Note tells the story behind the songs on Room 217. Sunrise, Sunset (Gentle Waters) – Jerry Bock & Sheldon Harnick, Alley Music Corp., Jerry Bock Enterprises & Trio Music Co.
One of the most powerful effects of a song is its ability to connect universal human emotions, events or ideas to human experience. Songs deliver messages and communicate universal truths that resonate with us. It is in this way that music helps us to identify and express the deeper feelings and thoughts of our lives. There are some songs that are extremely evocative and Sunrise, Sunset (Gentle Waters) is one of them.
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Power of Song and Presence
Our Rituals, Our Music
Eric & Lilian
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Room 217 Box Set of therapeutic music resources provides variety, convenience and easy storage. 
Click here to order.
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About Towersey The Towersey Foundation is a unique charity providing music therapy in palliative care for people living with life-threatening illnesses. Towersey funds numerous appointments in hospices and special schools, provides for home visits to those who are housebound and organises community groups for patients who cannot or do not wish to attend hospice groups. 
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About the Creative Aging SymposiumThe symposium seeks to promote recognition and development in the field of arts and aging in Canada and offers a unique opportunity for those in senior-serving agencies. The significance of arts and aging, in terms of cultural contributions, lifelong learning, community connections, social service and health care will be explored. It will also provide a forum for sharing experience, innovation, best practices and research. 
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About Hospice Info AnywhereAnytime, anywhere – a computerized case management system for any size of hospice that: records client information, manages relationships and case notes, tracks hours, generates reminders and real-time reports and collects/manages donations. Fast, affordable, modifiable. Less time doing paperwork leaves more time for clients. 
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About Music & the Brain SymposiumAimed at educating physicians and musicians about the novel and unique field of “neuromusic”, this unique concert-symposium will focus on the relationship between music and the physiological and pathological processes in the nervous system. It will also address the use/misuse of music as a therapeutic tool, the status of research in the field and the parallel of the impact of musical performance on the audience with the physician’s impact on the patient. 
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Music as a structured envelope of sound, is probably the most effective and safe opener to the doors of the psyche. It reaches beyond personal defenses to the realities and beauties of the person. Music gives access to the discovery of inner strength, uncovers the potential for creativity and manifests ways in which life can be lived from a center of inner security. Helen Bonny
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