Marjorie Briskey is resting in bed and chatting with staff in her room at Agrace health care when volunteer Marchelle Mertens pops in the door to ask a weekly question: Would she like to hear some music?
Text Size
A
A
Reset Text
Questions? We're here for you.
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
As reported by Gayle Worland, Wisconsin State Journal
Marjorie Briskey is resting in bed and chatting with staff in her room at Agrace health care when volunteer Marchelle Mertens pops in the door to ask a weekly question: Would she like to hear some music?
Mertens holds an iPad with a live Zoom connection to Stas Venglevski, an acclaimed accordion player from Milwaukee. The musician is performing as part of a program from Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society — an organization better known for its chamber music festival held each June with concerts in the Madison area.
But since late 2020, BDDS also has been performing virtual one-on-one concerts for patients in hospitals and hospice and memory care facilities. Thanks to a live connection with a skilled musician on one end of a Zoom call and a patient on the other, BDDS musicians have performed more than 150 virtual concerts in the past two years at locations including SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital, Oakwood University Woods, Capitol Lakes and Agrace.
BDDS was selected to be one of eight grant recipients to participate in the Vital Sounds Initiative from Project: Music Heals Us, a nonprofit with the goal of providing “encouragement, education and healing” through high-quality music for people who are elderly, disabled, incarcerated or homeless. Its Vital Sounds Initiative focuses on bedside concerts.
In Madison, the program takes a different form depending on the site. At Agrace hospice care, volunteers use an iPad to connect musicians with individual patients who, on that particular day, would like to hear some music. The musicians can view and chat with their solo audience and answer questions via the screen.
At St. Mary’s, the BDDS virtual concerts are more of a community event, with more than a dozen memory care and long-term patients gathered in the hospital’s chapel to see a musician perform live on a large screen.
“I think it’s important for memory care and long-term patients to see each other, because a bigger group makes it fun,” said Ashley Korbisch, director of activities and volunteers at St. Mary’s. During the large-screen concerts, “We have patients who sit there and close their eyes and relax,” she said. “We have people who are engaged and ask questions,” which a staff person types into a chat box so the musician on the other end of the Zoom call can read the questions and answer them.
“We also try to have live performances every week,” and the biweekly virtual concerts are yet another way to enjoy music and that connection, Korbisch said. “Live music is very needed — it goes back to music and memory. When I get older, I hope I can get involved in music events, too.”
BDDS is one of several groups — including the Madison Symphony Orchestra’s HeartStrings quartet, a frequent visitor to Agrace — that perform for patients in Madison-area medical settings. During the holiday season, Agrace is often flooded with calls from musicians and groups offering to perform there, said volunteer coordinator Barbara Graham. Those live concerts require a lot of coordination with volunteers and staff to bring patients in wheelchairs and beds to one central room.
It was very different during COVID-related closures, when musicians couldn’t visit at all, Graham recalled.
“I think the beauty of the iPad project was really born out of the pandemic,” she said. When BDDS first asked Agrace if it was interested in being part of the virtual concert series in late 2020, “I said absolutely, because at that point we didn’t have volunteers doing anything,” she said.
“They were totally put on hold because of the pandemic. So I actually was the one, for a couple of months, taking the iPad around to patients. And it was actually wonderful, because I don’t get to usually spend that much time directly with patients. And the ability to provide music to patients, when they weren’t able to receive any kind of extra activities (from volunteers), was wonderful.”
Venglevski now performs virtual concerts through BDDS about once a month. He often performs waltzes and polkas, as well as the theme from “Dr. Zhivago,” which “connects to people very well,” he said.
On the rounds in December with Mertens connecting him to patients via the iPad in her hands, Venglevski got requests for Christmas songs and played a jolly rendition of “Jingle Bells” and an excerpt from “The Nutcracker.” A cheerful Briskey requested “White Christmas.”
Both memory care and general patients at Agrace can choose whether to have a bedside virtual concert, Mertens said.
“For those people who choose to accept the music, it is a bright and lightening point in the day,” she said. “It’s a time you can focus on something else. It’s not the same TV programs.” And when guests are visiting, “they all seem to enjoy the music,” she said.
©2023 Agrace - All Rights Reserved. | Privacy Policy
