Talk In A Nutshell
Beatie Wolfe brings the artful core of our humanity to life through music that highlights the depth of our human intention for storytelling and ceremony.
The Script
Opening Story
I’ve always loved the stories of albums, the tangibility of records and the ceremony of listening. From the time I started writing songs (age 8) and discovered my parents’ record collection, I saw records as musical books, with the artwork providing the perfect backdrop for the story, and I loved opening them up and entering into the world of the album. There was also a ritual to the occasion. I started imagining what my album could look like, what it could feel like, what worlds I could create. When it was time for my first album to be released, it was a very different era with the digital replacing the physical. So I thought about how to connect the two and that’s what my work became centred around. Reimagining the vinyl experience but for today.
Statement Of Thesis: Music Is Core To Our Humanity
Why was this so important to me? Because music IS core to our humanity. We are a musical species more than anything else and music imprints on the brain deeper than any other human experience.
I believe that there are three things that allow something to go deep, to stay with us and forever change us. These are: tangibility, storytelling and ceremony.
Tangibility… as in a physical art form or space to explore… this could be a record jacket or the world’s quietest room… anything that grounds us in our present reality through a touchpoint.
Storytelling in the broadest sense of the word, the ability for the artist or creator to tell a story through their work that can engage the imagination and transport us.
And lastly but perhaps most importantly… Ceremony, the space around and within the experience that allows us to go deep, to be fully immersed.
I believe that these three things set the stage for the music and allow it to imprint. Imprint so that every one of those experiences becomes a part of who we are and what we carry with us. This doesn’t just apply to music, it applies to anything, everything that helps to reconnect us with ourselves and one another. It’s these experiences that help to keep us alive inside.
What Threatens These Musical Values Today?
Tangibility, storytelling and ceremony had always been part of the physical music listening experience and were just some of the things we lost when we moved to digital.
The digital era created access, it presented solutions but it also created an idea that we could fast track a lot of what defined us as humans to begin with and without the true cost or value reflected in the process.
Music now floats around in its intangible sphere as part of the background noise along with everything else that sits there… news articles, notifications, calendar reminders, social media… everything occupying this same superficial stream of information that infiltrates our day-to-day lives, bombarding our sensory systems until we are numb, overloaded and fatigued. Music, and art, have become part of that constant background chatter and we have forgotten why they are so much more.
How Can We Rescue Music And Restore Our Humanity? Science
There is a fine balance between what needs to be innovated and what needs to be preserved. So how do we reconcile the value of music and art in an industry that has decided that albums are obsolete and that singles need not be more than jingles, forgotten as easily as they are made? The opposite of imprinting.
I found part of my answer in neurology. The great late Oliver Sacks studied the power of music extensively and grounded what a lot of us feel intuitively about music, in science. In Musicophilia, his book about music and the brain, he documents the impact of music for every neurological condition from Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s, Autism to Schizophonia, showing how music is a remedy, a tonic, an orange juice for the ear.
And I realised that there was no greater application of music than this healing application… using music to reconnect us with ourselves and one another when nothing else could.
A seed was planted in the back of my mind and when I found out that my grandmother had been diagnosed with dementia I decided to take my guitar with me the next time I visited her and play her my songs… because why not?
Surprising Impact Of Live Performance For Patients With Dementia
Watching my grandmother transform from being confused and agitated to joyful and relaxed with just a song, moved me so deeply. I then decided to play for my father-in-law at his care home in Portugal and when the home director asked if I would play to everyone in the ward living with dementia and Alzheimer's, of course I agreed. Realising that no one in the home spoke English (except for my relative) and that my songs were unfamiliar to the residents, I expected a nice ambience at best. However watching people start to wake up, engage, clap along, even dance in their chairs, and become visibly reanimated from the music, just as Oliver had described, I realised that something important was happening.
And then the director informed me it was the best he had seen the group in the 10 years he had been there.
Something was crystalizing into view. What if music’s power was so strong, so interlinked with our own sense of self and wellbeing, that even without the memory component it could be a tonic, a remedy, a “way in”. What if it was the music and not the memory making the magic? In Musicophilia, Sacks had theorized that “music does not have to be familiar to exert its emotional pull” but he had not tested this. I had seen the tip of precisely this and wanted to see how much deeper it went.
Launch Of Research Project
Inspired by this insight, I began the Power of Music and Dementia research project with the Utley Foundation in 2014. The idea was to recreate what had occurred, naturally, in Portugal but this time with controls in place and the caregivers and doctors monitoring the residents. The intention was to show that even when memory was taken out of the equation the power of music prevailed.
As part of this project, I went into care homes all across the UK and performed a set of my original songs while the residents were monitored both during the live performance and the weeks following as they listened to the same songs on headsets.
The results were amazing. Both memory and communication were improved during the duration of the project and I saw some of the most powerful reactions to music I have ever seen. Reactions that imprinted on me forever.
I watched David transform from a catatonic-like state to dancing. And Anne who had not spoken a word in 7 months; during the performance broke into song. Every one of these breakthroughs felt like the most vital link in the chain of our understanding about what moves us, what restores us, what makes us uniquely human.
Global & Academic Recognition; Launch Of Charity
What began as a small research study in the UK was then recognized by leading academic and research institutions and was suddenly getting global attention. I found myself sitting with the top neurologists and brain experts as they picked my brain on the subject. And all because I asked a question, not as a doctor but as a musician.
Today music for dementia is becoming a global movement. The charity, MusicForDementia2020, (established out of my project) is now actively working to get music in all care homes in the UK by the end of this year and I continue to work with them as an ambassador.
Conclusion / Restatement Of Thesis: Core Power Of Music
So what did this teach me? It taught me to celebrate the experiences that keep us alive inside, that remind us of why we are here in the first place. At a time of more access than ever, how can we retain a sense of value? How can we choose to carve out deeper moments within the noise? How can we protect those endangered experiences that become our touchpoints, that shape our emotional sensibility, our identity, our wellbeing and create vast canyons and reserves in our very being?
We realise the importance of these choices when we realise the intrinsic value of music, and art, to us all as sentient beings.
When you have witnessed the power of music as medicine in this pure and concentrated way, which cannot be staged or fabricated. It either works or it doesn’t. When you see what music can do, even when language or memory are removed from the folds, see how the first few notes evokes a smile, a hand twitch, instantly, effortlessly and this builds and grows and it’s just them and the music... No tangible memories, no narrative, no point in time. Just them and the music, there and now. And the brain opens up like a flower, gently unfurling, presenting new pathways you never believed were there…
And you realise… that music is a necessity for those living with dementia because music is a necessity for every one of us.
