Harpist creates sweet sounds to heal the soul

Laura Cole plays her harp at care facilities that treat Alzheimer’s patients as well as at hospitals. SCOTT B. SMITH/FLORIDA WEEKLY The audience assembles slowly, fitfully, like sleepwalkers in a clouded dream: eight residents of Clare Bridge of Tequesta, a facility for Alzheimer’s and dementia care. They arrive in wheelchairs or pushing walkers or assisted by uniformed aides. Then, from their semi-circle of seating, they stare straight ahead, as if absorbed in deep thought, or afloat in the lack of it. It is 3 p.m. on a Friday, and time for harp therapy.

Laura Cole moves slowly, too. She slides her Westover folk harp from its black canvas cover and sets it on a small, ivorycolored pillow atop a footrest. She rubs Avalon Organics lotion onto her hands from the small sample bottle in her purse, because lotion, she says, “makes the strings sound sweeter.” She pours bottled water into a paper cup and sets it on the round wooden table beside her.

“I feel like I’m making a difference,” says Laura Cole of playing for dementia patients. COURTESY PHOTO She hopes, in the next hour, to perform a kind of magic. This sort of audience is rarely static, its response not always predictable.

This area is The Gallery, an extra-wide hallway where residents listen to visiting entertainers or play simple games. Sunlight, sliced by floor-to-ceiling venetian blinds, stripes the carpet. Ms. Cole plucks a few strings, plays a few notes. There is no reaction from her small audience. “Good to see you all,” she says. “It’s such a gorgeous day out.” Not a nod or a blink or a smile.

Ms. Cole begins to play “Pretty Maid Milking Her Cow,” a quiet-as-a-church piece she taught herself by ear from another harpist’s CD. And then the more familiar “Greensleeves,” one arm lifting up and away, graceful as a ballerina’s, the other steady, fingers stroking the strings.

Just to her left, a tall man in a berryred sweater sits with head bowed, ankles crossed, fingers interlaced in his lap, a prayerful posture. The woman beside him, wearing pink slacks and a pink-andwhite top, has her eyes closed. If they’re aware of Ms. Cole, they give no indication. And she takes no offense.

Her harp-therapy instruction included the mantra “take nothing personally.” And she doesn’t, not even when an alarm blares, again and again, declaring that a door has been left ajar longer than 15 seconds; this is a locked unit, as dementia patients are known to wander off.

Ms. Cole eases into the Scottish folk tune “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” and now the man in the red sweater is awake. “Beautiful,” he announces, beaming a smile in her direction. Ms. Cole plays “God Bless America” and “America the Beautiful.”

“Very well done,” says the man, who is in his late 80s and whose name is Bob. The woman in pink alongside him — her name is Helen, and she is 94 — is alert now, too, and smiles her approval.

The therapy is simple, direct, ancient. The use of music for healing is as old as musical notes.

The English scholar Robert Burton, best known for “The Anatomy of Melancholia,” wrote in the 16th century that music and dance were essential for treating mental illness, especially melancholia, now known as depression. Music, he wrote, has an “excellent power ...to expel many other diseases” and he called it “a sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy.” Even earlier, Abu Nasr Al-Farabi, a Muslim scientist and philosopher who lived from 872 to 950, wrote in “Meanings of the Intellect” about the therapeutic effect music has on the soul. And then, of course, there is the Bible and its story of King Saul, whose servants advised him, “to seek out a man who is a skilful player on the harp; and it shall be, when the evil spirit from God cometh upon thee, that he shall play with his hand, and thou shalt be well.”

Music and wellness began sharing a more formal link in the years after World War I and World War II, when the Veterans Administration used music to aid in the treatment of physical, psychological and emotional battle injuries. The practice of music therapy now requires a four-year degree.

Harp therapy, by contrast, is a newcomer.

“It’s still an emerging field,” says Edie Elkan, the founder of Bedside Harp Inc., the program from which Laura Cole earned her hospital certification in a series of workshops and a 240-hour internship that had her strolling through ICUs and ERs and into patients’ room, playing her harp. “With music therapy, the relationship is between the patient and the therapist. With harp therapy, the relationship is between the patient and the music.”

The harp, Ms. Elkan is saying, is especially enchanting. There is no hard science that proves its power to heal, but, she says, “clearly, it has something to do with the vibration. Patients will say, ‘You touched my soul.’”

Laura Cole’s good vibrations may touch souls, too. They certainly calm, soothe, entertain. And in the words of Miriam Pereira, Clare Bridge of Tequesta’s activities director, Ms. Cole’s music is more. It is “magical.”

The magic comes in scraps of memory, retrieved. It comes in mouths twitching into smiles. And that is what Ms. Cole’s small audience shows her.

By the time she strums “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” Bob and Helen are singing along, another resident is tapping his thigh in time to the music, and two aides and a supervisor have paused to join the group, nodding to the rhythm, even singing along.

“Documentaries have shown that using music can change brain function,” says Rebecca Lauter, a violinist and music professor at FAU. “It focuses the mind in a much better way than speech.” For people with Alzheimer’s, she says, “Music may trigger memories. Different parts of the brain have information that can be triggered in different ways.” Ask an Alzheimer’s patient, for example, if he knows the song “Daisy, Daisy” and the response may be no response, but play the music and the lyrics might pour out.

A Norwegian study found that exposure to live music made dementia patients less anxious and depressed. A French study of Alzheimer’s patients drew similar conclusions, noting improvements in patients’ mood, self-expression, mental processing, speech, sensory stimulation and motor skills. Patients in a study at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation reported that music therapy made their pain less disabling; the overall results credited music therapy with a 21-percent reduction in pain levels and a 25-percent drop in pain-related depression.

At Clare Bridge of Tequesta, Laura Cole shows again that old-timey songs make people, as she says, “think of better times. Even if they’re not responsive, you see them take deeper breaths, you see their shoulders relax.” And this is what keeps her playing; this is what tells her that, at last, she has found the calling meant for her.

She grew up in Montclair, N.J., 12 miles west of the bright lights, big city life of New York. After college, she tried book reviewing, then copywriting, and then lived for 11 years in the high-finance world of Wall Street, doing equity research for UBS, the giant wealth-management, investment-banking firm.

Her creative side sought solace at Renaissance fairs and an annual joust with a Middle Ages fantasy-reenactment camp, where she strolled amid costumed knights and princesses, warriors and archers and harp-playing minstrels, her imagination at play. The music wove its spell around her, light and strong as a spider’s web.

Things began to fall in place after that, like notes on a scale. At a medieval Yule feast, she met a harp teacher and began to learn the instrument, a natural progression after a childhood spent at the piano. At a summer harp festival, she met Edie Elkan, who taught harp therapy at host hospitals in Pennsylvania and in Ms. Cole’s home state of New Jersey. In workshops, Ms. Cole learned about the healing effects of music, and more. “You learn about yourself, who you are,” she says, “You’re right there, among people who are sick and sometimes dying. Not everyone can do that.”

Not everyone can ignore the interruptions either, but Ms. Cole seems unfazed when one man in her small audience mutters phrases, a half dozen times, his words loud but unintelligible. She doesn’t flinch when any angry-sounding man in a wheelchair yells urgently from far down the hallway, “Margie! Margie!” She doesn’t even look up when Helen, the woman in pink, asks audibly, “What time do they have supper here?” and, a few minutes later, “I’m so hungry. I want to eat something.”

Ms. Pereira fetches a plastic cup of applesauce, and Helen spoons it up contentedly. Ms. Cole says nothing, letting her harp speak for her.

From the rousing “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” to the romantic “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and “La Vie en Rose” — which has Ms. Pereira singing along in French — the music lifts its audience out of the troublesome present and into a sunnier past.

“Sometimes, patients will request certain tunes because it reminds them of better times,” says Ms. Elkan, the harp-therapy teacher. “It’s amazing what music can do.”

Ms. Cole saw the effects at Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, N.J. and St. Clare’s Hospital in Denville, where she spent hours each week, making the rounds, playing the music, discovering the variety of reactions. There were patients who wept, patients who sang along, patients who said go away.

And she learned that go away was OK: “It’s probably therapeutic for them. I’m the only person they can say ‘no’ to. They can’t say ‘no’ to their doctor. They can’t say ‘no’ to their nurse. They can’t say ‘no’ to their family. I give them a bit of power back.”

That was much of her training from 2005 until 2009, when she moved to Florida, following family members and fleeing blizzards. Now, she estimates that 70 percent of her Cloud Nine Harp hours are spent at healthcare facilities, the rest playing for weddings and parties. The latter is the more lucrative, earning her $75 an hour, but she’s willing to negotiate, she says, for those who can afford only $40 for a half hour.

It is her therapy work that plays on her heartstrings.

“I feel like I’m making a connection, making a difference,” she says. “Like I’m making a friend. If I get a smile, that makes my day.”

She thinks of the patient who thanked her for playing “All I Ask of You” from “Phantom of the Opera” because it had been her wedding song; of the time she played for a terrible trio: a woman who screamed and screamed, another who threatened to throw things, the third arguing with the other two – a session that concluded with the screamer lulled into silence, the bully singing along, the arguments ending.

As her weekly hour at Clare Bridge draws to a close, Ms. Cole plays “Memories” from the Broadway show “Cats.” Her listeners are silent now, perhaps drawn back into memories of their own.

— For more information, check Laura Cole’s Web site www.cloudnineharp. com; call her at Cloud Nine Harp, 561- 249-1176; or e-mail laura@cloudnineharp. com 