Zest
Healing strikes right chord with harp player
Music gaining currency
as complementary
medical treatment
BY GLORIA STRAVELLI
Staff Writer

CHRIS KELLY staff Marlene Satter of Oceanport, a certified music practitioner, has found herself in every part of a hospital, from the the nursery to ICU, using her music to soothe spirits.

Engrossed in playing lullabies on her Celtic harp, Marlene Satter hadn’t noticed the quiet that settled over the hospital nursery.

"I was sitting in a rocking chair and there were bassinets all around the small nursery," she recalled. "I started playing one melody after another. When I looked around, the nurses were almost asleep and all the babies were utterly silent. I’m looking around and playing and thinking, ‘These are very well-behaved babies.’

"When I got up to leave, the nurses said, ‘Do you have to go? They’re never this quiet.’ "

The tranquil nursery is just one of the responses to Satter’s therapeutic harp playing. She plays a lap harp for patients in hospitals, nursing homes, hospices and the homes of ailing patients.

Satter is a hospital-certified music practitioner trained in the Bedside Harp Program at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, Hamilton, one of a growing number of music practitioners trained in the ancient practice of using music as medicine.

"It’s one of the ways that [music] was used in the distant past, and it’s coming back into use in the most cutting-edge hospitals and care systems," said Satter of Oceanport, founder of Harp’s Desire music therapy program (www.harpsdesire.net).

"I’ve played everywhere from the neonatal unit, critical care, ER waiting room to the maternity ward," she said. "You play for whoever wants you. Sometimes they don’t want it, and I stand in the hall and play, and they listen and change their minds."

A complementary medicine, music therapy is based on the theory that all music is essentially vibration that can promote healing or ease the process of dying.

"Everything in the universe vibrates, all the way down to the atomic and subatomic level," Satter explained. "We vibrate in response to what we hear, whether we’re aware of it or not. If we’re in the presence of specific vibrations long enough, our bodies will strive to vibrate in sync with those vibrations — that’s called entrainment.

"Music offers good vibrations that can entrain you with a more peaceful state of mind, or even entrain one organ of the body with the others so that the body functions better," she added.

Music for healing is made up of modes: Aeolian, Locrian, Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and Myxolidian, Satter explained.

"Each mode can affect a different part of the body or a different system within the body," she said. "Depending on the patient’s ailment and state of health, different modes can be used to release whatever is blocked within their systems, or to support them as they move toward healing or toward death — which can also be a form of healing although not commonly recognized as such in Western medicine." 

Proponents of music therapy say music can lower blood pressure, stabilize the heart rate, boost the immune system, induce sleep in patients unable to rest and reduce the need for pain medication.

Music practitioners such as Satter have found that Alzheimer’s patients and people who are uncommunicative sometimes speak or sing along with the harp music.

The Bedside Harp Program is also in place at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital at Rahway. The Cancer Institute of New Jersey has begun a study to measure the effects of live harp music on chemotherapy patients, after finding that it reduced the pain and nausea connected with treatments.

After playing guitar for many years, Satter took up harp playing a few years ago and discovered harp therapy programs at a folk harp festival.

When she heard of a new program at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in Hamilton, the Oceanport resident enrolled.

"I really wanted to do this; 9/11 had happened, I was working in New York as an editor, and I really wanted to do something meaningful," explained Satter, who has published novels, short stories and poetry under the nom de plume Lee Barwood. "This was something I could do."

The Bedside Harp Program requires harpists to master a repertoire of several dozen songs ranging from hymns to ethnic folk songs to Broadway show tunes.

Instruments used in bedside music therapy must be small enough to be toted around.

Satter uses a Clarsach, a traditional Celtic 20-string, wire-strung harp that produces a ringing, chime-like sound as well as a 27-string, nylon strung harp that produces a deeper tone.

"You wear the harp on a strap so you can walk around with it. You don’t need a chair or music stand," she explained. "You just go in and literally stand at the bedside and play."

The use of music as an adjunct to medicine can be traced to ancient Greece, noted Satter, when prescriptions for patients often included music composed to treat a particular ailment. 

Some cultures have retained the use of sound as medicine, she added, evidenced in the chants of shamans and medicine men and women and the chanting of monks.

But music as medicine fell out of favor.

"Since the so-called Age of Enlightenment, science pooh-poohed music’s ability to have any real effect on people’s health," Satter said.

With acceptance of alternative and complementary forms of medicine growing, music therapy is gaining in popularity, said Satter, who pointed out that a modern equivalent is ultrasound technology.

"Ultrasound is one way that science is using vibrations to treat the ills of the body," she said. "Very fast vibrations, usually very highly focused, are used today for everything from breaking up kidney stones to accelerating the healing of broken bones to checking on the health of unborn babies and finding blockages in arteries. 

"Music is vibration, too, and has the ability to work on our health just as strongly," she said. "Since it is not as focused, it affects the broader well-being of the listener and the player. We can feel it within our bodies."

Even physicians who are skeptical acknowledge that there are benefits to the bedside music therapy program, she said.

"Doctors have told me how beautiful and soothing my playing was," she said. "Even if they don’t understand, they can appreciate the physical effect it has on patients; they can see that it lowers the stress level, and that’s a major thing."

Satter has found herself playing the harp in just about every part of the hospital, from the nursery to the intensive care unit. She doesn’t always know ahead of time where she will set up with her harp, but finds she generally ends up where there is a need.

After a stressful day when several patients had turned down her offer to play for them, Satter said she was trying to find a place to play and slipped into a waiting area for families.

"I had been having a lousy day and just had to sit and play and regroup," she said. "A few people were in the lounge and a very intense man came over, sat down opposite me and just stared at my hands on the harp.

"I kept quietly playing. His mother was in intensive care, and he was waiting for her doctor, and everyone was very stressed."

Satter continued playing when the doctor came in and family members conferred with him, then left — but the man who had been watching her play came back into the room.

"He sat down and said, ‘I just wanted to thank you. That’s the most peaceful I’ve felt in days.’

"Apparently, you end up where you’re supposed to be," Satter said. "They say that in our classes. I don’t know how I ended up there, but this is what I was supposed to be doing. There are a lot of stories like that."