A 90-minute reprieve from a world gone crazy
CMU professor’s performance shows how music can help escape a ‘tunnel of grief’
BY KRIS B. MAMULA PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
On a cold afternoon at Heinz Memorial Chapel at the University of Pittsburgh, violinist Monique Mead joined 15 musicians and others who played 60 crystal bowls. The goal: Create an immersive experience.
More than 200 people showed up for Sunday’s sold-out event toting blankets and pillows for snuggling in the oak pews, sitting in the shadow of the soaring stained-glass windows and bathing in healing sound. It was a 90-minute reprieve from winter and a world gone crazy.
“Welcome to the mega sound bath, the largest in Pittsburgh,” Ms. Mead told the crowd, the lights turned down low. “This is not a concert; it’s not about us. It’s about you and your experience.” For Ms. Mead, the healing began seven years earlier during her own dark night of the soul — a time of pain, loss and doubt. That was when Beethoven spoke to her.
Taking a lesson from Beethoven’s life, she found the strength needed to get through her own dark times. It was a path that led her to Heinz Chapel on Sunday. For three decades, Ms. Mead, 55, has performed on major international stages throughout the U.S., Europe and Mexico, where she has appeared as a soloist, presenter and chamber musician. She is also the founding director of music entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University, a position she has held since 2012.
Her experience with the healing properties of sound began years ago when she came down with chicken pox. She was 7 years old, at home with her parents, three sisters and a brother in Fort Wayne, Ind. Her mother preferred natural remedies, so when the little girl complained about virus symptoms, she put on a recording of Franz Schubert’s Trout Quintet, a piece he wrote in 1819. “My pain and itching went away entirely,” Ms. Mead said. “That made a huge impression on me about what music can do.”
Sound has a rich history in healing, serving as part of healing rituals in ancient Egypt, Greece and India. In the U.S., the National Association for Music Therapy was set up in 1956 in New York City and the first modern sound bath was conducted in San Francisco in 1975 to promote meditation and relaxation.
Music can do more than smooth the kinks of a bad day though; it can affect emotions and biology, according to those who study its impact. Think of the fear-inducing major and minor chords flooding Halloween horror flicks, the lightness that comes from hearing the strings of a harp.
Science is finding that sound can do still more.
A 2022 study that appeared in the journal Molecules noted: “The possibility of influencing the human body on a biomolecular level and stimulating, modifying or repairing the functionality of vital biomolecular structures just by using sound, holds tremendous potential.”
A study published in the Hayati Journal of Biosciences in 2017 found that exposing waterborne single-cell organisms to a simple piano ditty made the creatures grow 58% faster than ones not exposed to the music.
“Surrendering to the sound” on Sunday at Heinz Chapel was intended to effect the same kind of transformation, this time in the very biology of the people attending who Ms. Mead said may have brought their own burdens.
‘It healed me’
Before healing and light, though, before pain is tempered into clarity, there can be years of darkness, which Ms. Mead knows well.
Her spell of darkness began with the unraveling of her marriage in 2018. She worried about her two teenage children and how they would cope as she prepared to pack her things and sell her house.
About this time, the Edgewood Symphony Orchestra invited Ms. Mead, then 49, to perform Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major at an event. The invitation was an answer to a lifelong dream to play the challenging piece when she reached age 50.
But with all that was going on in her life in the breakup of her marriage, she didn’t think she had the strength for it. Then she thought of what Beethoven had been going through when he wrote the piece in 1806.
Vienna, the Austrian city where Beethoven lived, had been seized by Napoleon the previous year, leading to food shortages. When Beethoven wrote the concerto, he was 36 years old with money problems and increasingly isolated from others, partly because of hearing loss.
He was suffering from depression and encroaching deafness and diabetes, an alcoholic who was unwittingly poisoning himself with wine fortified with sugar of lead, a common additive at the time to enhance flavor.
Beethoven battled back against the adversity. His defiance in the face of difficulty turned into a burst of creative energy in 1806 in what became his best known concerto. The composition, three movements lasting about 45 minutes in all, touched Ms. Mead in a spiritual way.
“It’s very difficult to talk about it,” she said. “There’s something tremendously sacred to me about this piece. “There’s perfection of structure, there’s grandeur, there’s forgiveness, this coming to terms with your lot, your fate, a grace and forgiveness.” “It’s the musical embodiment of truth,“ she said. “In the end, it healed me.”
Constellations of sound
For Sunday’s event, which is part of a continuing series, Ms. Mead played the violin accompanied by her daughter, Isabel Cardenes on harp. Other performers used soft mallets in coaxing layered humming from large crystal bowls in the center isle, at the sides of the chapel and even from the choir loft. Ms. Mead called it “constellations of sound.”
A gray-haired woman sat quietly in the choir loft staring straight ahead during the performance; in front of her was a young man in a tassel cap who gazed at a stained glass reaching skyward. A few others said it was their first experience of sound immersion. Ms. Mead said she has been heartened in the past by responses to similar performances.
Right after her divorce in 2019, Ms. Mead performed Beethoven’s concerto with the Edgewood Symphony with a Stradivarius violin on loan from Carnegie Mellon. She then decided to perform the piece at 50 concerts in 250 days to mark the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020. The singing crystal bowls, gongs and other soothing instruments would come later.
Playing the Stradivarius, she performed the concerto in wildly different venues — in concert halls, a locked dementia unit at a nursing home, even on a mountain top in Mexico, where the audience was a group of hikers. Her last concert of the series was December 2019 at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland, again with the Edgewood Symphony.
Then COVID-19 struck. Concert halls went dark. In February 2021, her mother died, a month after being diagnosed with cancer. string of unexpected deaths followed — a colleague, dear friends and most recently, the loss of her father. The result, Ms. Mead said, was a long “tunnel of grief.” Instead of withdrawing, she pushed back by opening her music to a still wider audience.
Beethoven and adversity
She created a website called Beethoven in the Face of Adversity, where anyone feeling anxious or who was going through a difficult stretch could request a performance — free.
“Music was a vessel that could hold the grief of the world,” she said.
By request, she played on the sidewalk outside the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill, where 11 people were executed in 2018 by a delusional gunman; she performed for cancer patients and on the porch of her home in Shadyside accompanied by son Tino and daughter Isabel on piano and harp. On warm summer evenings, the porch concerts sometimes drew hundreds of neighbors.
“She was using this music to spread joy,” said Darshil Shastri, a marketing manager at Microsoft in Seattle who met Ms. Mead a few years ago when he was an MBA student at Carnegie Mellon.
Along with the expanding number of concerts and increasingly diverse venues came new light. She partnered with the Awareness & Wellness Center in Shadyside in offering sound healing classes to complement psychotherapy offered there. “That’s when I realized that it’s not about where you perform,” she said. “At times of loss, our focus is on what is really important — love and human connection.
“The focus is so much about the human connection, creating a bridge between my heart and yours.”
