[gentle music] - On this episode of The Best Times, we meet some remarkable Memphians from a variety of backgrounds who have come together to explore the connections between music and medicine and to use established science to guide them to develop a holistic program of patient care.

[gentle music] - (male announcer) Funding for The Best Times is provided by the Plough Foundation, striving to do the greatest good by helping the greatest number of people since 1964.

Additional funding is provided by the members of WKNO, thank you.

[gentle music] - Welcome to a special episode of The Best Times.

I'm Cris Hardaway.

Martin Luther is attributed as writing, "My heart, which is so full to overflowing, "has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary."

I think that many of us can relate to this sentiment, but emerging research and science is showing that music may have an even greater role to play with medicine.

Our show tonight features conversations with a group of professionals from different backgrounds, musicians, doctors, a cultural arts institution, a religious leader, who are currently engaged in an initiative to explore and utilize music in conjunction with medicine.

While their experiences may vary, they all passionately believe that music can provide not only pleasure or entertainment, but help in healing as well.

To begin, I'd like to introduce you to Michelle Pellay-Walker.

Michelle is the second chair violist of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra and has been with the symphony for almost 40 years.

[gentle viola music] - I just finished my 39th season with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra.

I started playing piano when I was three or four years old and took up guitar when I was eight and started playing violin and viola when I was 12 and a half and have also sung all the way from elementary school all the way through undergraduate school.

And for the last 18 years, I've been singing in the choir at Calvary Episcopal Church.

I'm an alto.

[gentle viola music] I can go for a couple of weeks without playing and then I start to go stir-crazy.

So it really is my lifeblood and it always has been.

And being in the orchestra, being a part of the orchestra, being a part of that sound, [lively orchestral music] it's like sitting inside the stereo where I sit, which is just an amazing, amazing feeling [lively orchestral music] to know that you're part of this incredible music and you've been listening to it all your life and now you're playing it and sharing it with other people and it's just a wonderful feeling.

- But Michelle's life hasn't been without its challenges.

- I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, and I can't say that it was a surprise since that disease had killed my parents and had also killed my paternal grandfather.

So I wasn't surprised.

I found the lump during a self-examination and had a biopsy and the news came back exactly what I expected it to be.

- Dr. David Schwartz is the Chair of Radiation Oncology at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center.

- Cancer is incredibly unique in our culture with regards to its... overwhelming broad impact on a person and their entire collective family social structure.

It isn't simply a physical disease, it's also an emotional experience that has a stigma and a fear factor that is not associated with many other conditions that we face.

In the scheme of things, cancer is relatively rare.

Most people don't get cancer, most people don't die of cancer.

Heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, these are things that people have to contend with for the entirety of their lives and are not necessarily cured, cancer can be.

- And I still remember when I went in to see my surgeon for our first consultation.

We introduced each other and sat down and she just looked me straight into the eye and the first words out of her mouth was, "This is not a death sentence."

And that, it used to be you say cancer and you're writing obituaries.

- Typically, a patient sees a surgeon first, gets a biopsy performed to confirm that they have a cancer and what kind of cancer that they have.

And then after that's established, see either a chemotherapy doctor or a radiation doctor if it's something that makes sense for them to see.

- Fortunately, it was caught early.

It had not spread, it was small, and I had the option of a mastectomy or a lumpectomy, and I went with the latter because the healing process would be quicker.

And because I was diagnosed right before the season began, I obviously didn't wanna miss any more playing than I absolutely had to, so a quick heal time was very, very important to me.

I did have to undergo chemotherapy and radiation.

- So radiation oncology is one of the fundamental pillars of treating cancer.

It is a local treatment that's designed to selectively kill cancer cells while sparing normal tissues and organs that surround where a tumor is.

It typically is considered one of the most puzzling, foreign, and confusing of cancer treatments because it's not something that people see in day-to-day life.

So it's very scary.

It's something that impacts the fundamental sense of security that patients have when they're experiencing cancer treatment.

But at day's end, it's designed to make a tumor go away where it comes from.

- I will say, and this is really important, from my perspective, I had a first-rate medical team.

They were absolutely fabulous.

Every person I had to deal with, they kept me on point.

There were never any surprises.

I always knew to expect, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, without any surprises.

And that made a difference too.

Having a team that was so on top of their field made it easy for me to know what to expect and know when I was gonna have a problem.

If there's gonna be a problem, this is what it's going to be.

- And at that point, the carousel commences spinning.

You see all of these doctors in specific sequences, depending on the kind of cancer that you have.

Your entire day, entire weeks can be filled with appointments and with coordination and with activities and with phone calls and billing and rigmarole that comes with all of this complex treatment for weeks to months, and then it ends.

The umbilical cord is cut from the treatment phase and then you enter in what's called the survivorship phase.

On the provider side, we call it surveillance.

- Music kept me sane.

If I had gone with a mastectomy, I would've probably had to miss half the season while I healed, and that was a non-option.

So I worked very closely with the personnel manager to make sure that I missed a minimal amount of playing time and I did as much playing as I possibly could.

[soft viola music] Because no matter what's going on in my life, when I've got that instrument under my chin and I'm playing a musical line, th at's all I care about, is doing the best I can to pr esent what the composer wrote.

And getting into it emotionally, that does happen a lot with me wi th some of the pieces I play, and I think that's a good thing.

Focusing on the music when you're in a performance or even a rehearsal situation, it's a big deal.

And that's just kind of been my MO pretty much my entire life.

When I'm playing, I don't give a damn about anything else.

I went through eight really rough months, but it's been 14 and a half years, and I'm fine.

- In addition to their experiences with cancer care, Michelle and Dr. Schwartz are also connected through our next guest, Dr. Zak Ozmo.

Dr. Ozmo is a composer, conductor, musician, academic, and researcher, who also hosts the radio show, "Music and Medicine", on WYXR.

Music has played an important role in Zak's life, and he has dedicated himself to sharing his talents, experience, and drive to help others.

His story begins far from the city he now calls home.

- Well, I was born in former Yugoslavia, in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I started my musical training very early on at the age of six or so.

And music and arts, in general, have always played a great role in my family.

My family was not a stranger to grief or to art.

My grandparents were Holocaust survivors and they always saw music and art, in general, as something higher, as something that really helps us get through this life.

My maternal grandfather was a conductor, so music was always there.

It started playing a tremendous role during my teenage and late teenage years.

As you may be familiar, in 1991, former Yugoslavia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, there was a war there.

So in 1991, I witnessed the start of a devastating war in my home country that would soon envelop it.

I left as a refugee.

And during this period and the years that followed, which were terribly difficult.

Music really played a crucial role.

It presented itself very much as salvation.

It helped me prop myself up physically and emotionally.

It gave me strength to keep on going.

It reminded me of who I was and it just gave me hope that there is future.

And when I first started studying music at the university, that was in the '90s, because of the role that music had in helping me through some of the most difficult periods of my life, I really have decided that the role has placed upon me almost to share that with other people.

And I decided to do that through both high-level performance and through clinical applications of music.

So during my undergraduate studies, I was taking both courses in performance and music therapy.

After I completed my postgraduate studies and moved to London, again, I started doing on a professional level both work and performance and I continued work in clinical applications of music.

My wife, Vanessa Rogers, was offered a professorship at Rhodes College, which she accepted.

For a number of years, I remained based in London, in Europe.

She was here, and then our first child was born.

That became more and more difficult.

I was traveling a lot.

And then on one occasion when we were doing video messaging, I saw my daughter chasing a plane, waving at it, saying, "Daddy, daddy."

And then that became a little bit heartbreaking.

And when our second child was born, Memphis officially became home.

- I met Zak truly by happenstance.

We gave back-to-back TED Talks for Memphis TEDx in 2019.

He won't admit to this, but he gave a much better talk than I gave.

He talked about the role of music as part of the refugee experience.

And we share cultural and religious background, so I initially was, I very much connected to the storyline and the hook of what he was saying.

But the concept of being a refugee, of being out of your element, to being cast by fortune into a setting that is not familiar to you and is, in fact, a threat is almost identical to that of the cancer patient at initial diagnosis.

- We started talking and he mentioned that he would like to include music in some way in his clinic, as I have been developing a concept of using music in the treatment of cancer and other diseases.

I wrote up this proposal, I sent it to him, and as they say, the rest is history.

- We also, in a lot of ways, complement one another in the aspect of being able to utilize music to improve people's lives in very different ways that could be incredibly fulfilling to work together on.

- And my hope is, and that is being worked on at the moment, to create a Memphis-wide initiative in which music and sound are used to support the well-being of the Memphis community.

And the response that I have received so far has been tremendous, so I've created a network of the major educational, artistic, religious organizations, musical ensembles, individual artists, and so on, all of whom are taking part in this initiative.

- So, what physiological effects does music have?

And how do those effects complement what we know about how our bodies heal?

- When a sound wave hits our ear, making the sensory cells inside of our ear transform that sound wave into mechanical vibrations, those mechanical vibrations are then turned into neurological impulses which then start different chemical and electrical processes in our brain.

So what happens, it's quite amazing.

We have chemicals, such as cortisol, which is a stress hormone, neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, which is in charge of regulating our mood, serotonin, which is related to our reward and pleasure centers in our brain, oxytocin, which is love hormones, and then endorphins, which are actually natural opiates that reduce pain in our body.

They're all released, they're all manipulated through music.

So basically, if we know how to use music and sound, that way we can pretty much get predictable results by using music in a particular way.

- It has only recently been formally established that there are deep connections between the neural system and the immunological system and it's called neuroimmunology.

I had never realized that white blood cells circulating in your bloodstream, some of them contain opioids.

They can actually deliver pain relief chemically directly to sites of inflammation.

Areas that may have received my own treatment, like radiation treatment, those responses are actually transmitted back to the brain in a cycle of responses that provide balance between your own neural-hormonal status and your immunological status.

There are dense connections between your own emotional state, which are transmitted long distance through your body through neurohormones to lymph tissue, where white blood cells train and become mature enough to be able to handle invaders such as tumor cells.

- Recent studies have actually shown that music-based interventions are much more efficient in treating anxiety than anti-anxiety pills.

In the context of cancer treatment, for example, 15 minutes of music or music-based intervention during a chemotherapy treatment that lasts 30 minutes or so reduces the side effects of chemotherapy for more than 30%.

So these are quite formidable effects that music has on our body - Drugs have their place.

Technology has its place.

Cold, hard metal, surgical blades, radiation beams, fancy molecules, all have their place.

They are a bedrock to cure the biology of cancer.

But again, cancer is something where it's not just the biology that needs to be healed.

None of those things handle the spiritual cost of a cancer diagnosis and course of treatment.

Non-pharmaceutical, i.e.

holistic, human-based treatment is what's important for spiritual and social healing that leads to a recovery of full function and a full return to society.

There are no drugs for that.

You can't take an aspirin to feel good about yourself.

You can get slightly less depressed and perhaps less anxious, but that wears off.

Something like music can bring you back to a place from your own memories, from your own, perhaps, most fundamental bedrock of feeling like yourself brings you back too.

That, to me, is a cancer cure.

Okay, that's priceless.

And to be able to have a patient come back to me in my clinic and tell me they're back to singing, getting back to a church and singing in the choir, playing with a band, just strumming a guitar with friends and with kids, teaching piano to their grandkids, that tells me there's a real cure, not just a CT scan or a blood test.

- Let's meet some of the leaders of organizations that have joined Dr. Ozmo's initiative.

Peter Abell is the President and CEO of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, one of the oldest cultural arts institutions in Memphis.

Before his current role at the symphony, he spent 20 years working with Boy Scouts of America, Youth Villages, and Porter-Leath, which only strengthened his commitment to work for our community.

- So we just finished our 70th season of continuous operation.

The reality is we were actually the fifth iteration of the symphony that restarted back in 1952.

So there's been an organized orchestra here, one way or another, since 1861, as far back as we can tell.

And the Civil War broke it up and then the yellow fever epidemic and then World War I, and the Depression, all these things, these world events closed the organization.

The players all stayed.

And we've seen that these last few years with the pandemic.

We stayed open.

The reason we stayed open is 'cause people asked us to.

It wasn't because we had to, it was 'cause people said, we want to hear music, we wanna participate.

That was strange.

We could have only small groups of people with us, and sometimes it was online and methods we hadn't used before, but people were very clear with us, we want you to do this.

And so we listened and we did it.

This is kind of what we believe with our mission, which is to engage with this music-rich community through art and dynamic programs, is really answered by other people, not by us, right?

Whether or not it was dynamic, whether or not it was exceptional, those are things other people decide, not us.

The way we see it here at the Memphis Symphony is that you can best connect through things that have already connected with people.

So if we wanna work in a certain community, for example, we would need to work with a group who is already known and trusted and works in that community.

And that will be a much more meaningful experience for everyone, the participants, it's also more meaningful for us because it moves us, it moves us into a place of better understanding.

We just perform the best we can, but do it through partnerships.

I mean, it's key to institutions like the Memphis Symphony, institutions like social service groups.

You'll always have more impact if you work authentically through partners, as opposed to trying to do it all yourself.

- Rabbi Micah Greenstein is a respected leader in the Memphis faith community and the Senior Rabbi at Temple Israel Memphis, where he has served his congregation for three decades.

He has a personal and spiritual connection to music and enthusiasm for Dr. Ozmo's work.

- Well, full disclosure, I am a person who has been smitten by music and moved to tears by music.

I am a person who thankfully has never recovered from the blows of music.

In my faith tradition, Judaism, music isn't just the language of prayer, music is prayer because music heals the soul like no other medicine.

And I'm just thrilled that Dr. Ozmo and his team have shown scientifically how music is more than just music, that music has a biochemical impact on our bodies, as well as our minds and souls.

- We've so far spoken about the physiological benefits music can have in healing.

To explore the emotional and spiritual relief music can provide, we offer this story of loss, healing, and inspiration.

- I lost my father when I was young, he was in the orchestra.

His name was Jack Abell.

He was the principal violist of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra.

- Jack Abell was only 48 years old when he succumbed to pancreatic cancer.

Here's how the experience of his loss affected one of his fellow orchestra members and what she did to help others heal.

- It's been almost 29 years since we lost Jack.

We had been stand partners for two years, a year on, a year off, a year back on.

It was one of the worst summers of my life, having to watch that process and knowing there was nothing I could do about it, except be there.

I played at his memorial service and I played his viola.

- Just as a healing moment, the entire orchestra got together and played a concert for us.

It would've been his next birthday.

- And we had a dozen violas that played on that program.

It's one of the few concerts that I've actually organized from top to bottom, and I've always been glad that I did that because it meant a lot to all of us in our healing, and hopefully, it touched the family the way it was supposed to.

They were all there that night.

- I mean, I think back on things like that as a young person seeing this musician community healing someone that they cared about in the way they knew how.

- Jewish tradition teaches that any person expresses sorrow on three levels.

The first level, which is understandable when bad things happen to good people, is to cry.

The next level is utter silence, where you're so stupefied by whatever has happened that you're speechless.

But the highest level, the rabbis say, is to transform that sorrow into song.

- As the birthplace of the blues, Memphis is only too familiar with turning sorrow into song.

While music therapy programs and care exist in other cities, here are some reasons our guests think Memphis is uniquely qualified for a program like this.

- I think if Memphis had to adopt a quote for its soul as a city, it would probably be the philosopher Nietzsche, who said, "Without music, life itself would be a mistake."

- There actually is a fairly rich history of using music and medicine at St. Jude.

The kids, it's a fairly obvious use of music to help in the pediatric cancer treatment setting.

Why should we leave the adults out?

We're just bigger kids, just like they're just smaller adults.

Providing it to adults really, to me, is just a logical next step.

- I have never lived in a place, and I lived in a number of places, where I had so many people that I genuinely like in such a close radius around me.

So since people define a place, that defined Memphis for me.

That was the first thing.

The second thing was a tremendous potential that I felt Memphis had and Memphis has when people and organizations work together.

- For more information on Dr. Zak Ozmo, visit ZakOzmo.com.

You can find episodes of the first season of his music and medicine show at WYXR.org/music-and-medicine.

That's all the time we have.

Thank you for joining us for this special episode of The Best Times.

I'm Cris Hardaway.

Goodnight.

[gentle music] - (male announcer) Funding for The Best Times is provided by the Plough Foundation, striving to do the greatest good by helping the greatest number of people since 1964.

Additional funding is provided by the members of WKNO.

Thank you.

[gentle music] [acoustic guitar chords]