Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: The story that the music tells is always more real and more honest than anything you can put into words. Because there's no translation. We're not listening to speech and translating into thought. The music is its own direct contact to your emotional being.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Welcome to the Age of Aging, a podcast about living well with an aging brain, produced by the Penn Memory center. I'm Jake Johnson.
[00:00:49] Speaker C: And I'm Terrence Casey.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Terrence, I'm kind of curious, what's your experience with art and music? Do you have a background in it at all?
[00:00:59] Speaker C: I do.
It's been a while, but I grew up in a really musical household, one of five kids. Everybody played some combination of instruments. Probably my longest tenure is playing piano. Took lessons for about twelve years or so, and will still tinker very poorly at home, but spent some time with the cello and the saxophone. I spent some time in choirs from elementary school through high school.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Wow, you sound pretty prolific as a drummel.
[00:01:29] Speaker C: You ever hear the phrase of master of none? That was where I was.
I loved dabbling in a lot of different instruments, but I was always a second chair at best, at my various instruments.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: I'm gonna, I'm gonna sound pretty pathetic in comparison, but I've had very little.
I tried the guitar when I was a kid a few times, and just, I could never be consistent with it. I've always kind of thought of myself as a big consumer of art. I love art. And I remember as a kid I wanted to be a movie critic and I used to watch all of these movie reviewers on YouTube.
Maybe that's kind of why I'm, that's why I'm doing podcasting, because it's kind of, it's not as intensive as putting together a symphony or like drawing something. There's, there's kind of just raw materials available to you and then you just have to kind of edit it and comment on it. But yeah, I only asked the question because I. The story that I have been working on has been about the kind of intersection between science and the memory center and arthem. So I'm also kind of curious what the history of art at the memory center has been. You've been here much longer than me.
[00:02:44] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. Art has played a definite role in how we care for older adults at the Penn Memory center, both with our patients and also their caregivers, but also in the form of research as well. Going back to when I first started working here in the Stone Ages, we worked with a researcher who was a nursing student who is very interested in multiple different ways of how persons living with cognitive impairment engaged with the arts. But part of that work was this researcher had created a community choir out of Penn memory center patients and caregivers, similar to how we talked about memory cafes in a previous episode. We weren't identifying. So and so has cognitive impairment. So and so is caring for another. But rather, this is just a safe space for older adults to gather and sort of celebrate their singing. And then, of course, most recently, we had the arts on the mind festival earlier this year. And I'm guessing that's where you're headed with this conversation.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: You are correct. That is where I'm headed with this conversation. As you said, this past spring, the Penn Memory center, in collaboration with the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and a ton of other Philly organizations, put together the arts on the mind festival, which really was an intersection between the mind, age related diseases like Alzheimer's and different kinds of art. Visual art, music performance, and opera was the final performance, and that was kind of the. The basis that started the whole festival off. So I really wanted to learn more about kind of how all of this came together and also trying to better understand why an arts festival.
[00:04:36] Speaker C: Yeah, so arts has played an oversized role in our research and care for the past decade, but I think the arts and the mind festival brought it all together. This is the first time that we worked with multiple different art groups, rather than just an individual who was interested in partnering with us. And I think one of our key takeaways from this event is how tight knit the arts community is in Philadelphia and just how many of them are interested in working with older adults or making the arts accessible to the widest portion of the population.
[00:05:21] Speaker D: For today's episode, I want to start at an event from earlier this year in March of 2024 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
[00:05:30] Speaker C: Welcome.
[00:05:30] Speaker E: My name is Jayatri Das, and I'm chief bioscientist here at the Franklin Institute. Welcome to tonight's Conversation Lab.
[00:05:38] Speaker D: The Franklin Institute is one of the oldest science museums and institutions for science education in the country. It, along with the Penn Memory center, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Philadelphia Film Society, the free library and Arts Philadelphia, formed a seemingly unlikely collaboration of philly based organizations this past spring.
Together, they launched the Arts on the Mind festival on March 13, 2024, which would run for two months, with six events in total covering the intersection of the brain, the mind, and various different art forms.
The first event at the Franklin Institute was called Science a conversation lab, and began with inviting guests to tour the your brain exhibit, which displayed different representations of the brain, as well as explored how the brain creates our perception. Following the self guided tour was a conversation between Penn Memory center co director and executive producer of the Age of Aging, doctor Jason Carlowish, and writer and artist doctor Anne Basting.
[00:06:42] Speaker E: Thank you, Jason.
[00:06:45] Speaker D: Doctor Carlois and doctor Basting started off by first addressing why a doctor and an artist were on stage together. And what followed was a discussion of the brain, the mind, and their relationship to creativity.
[00:06:58] Speaker F: The mind isn't just the brains. It's not just tasting coffee. It's tasting coffee as bitter or delightful. It's not just hearing music as a sound, hearing it and then thinking of a color.
And that's that aspect of experience, and that's what mind is about. So why are we then talking about creativity?
[00:07:19] Speaker E: Because that is a creative process, right? Interpreting and experiencing the world and making sense of the world as you move through it is actually a creative process. I usually do. I start out in training, and I'll say, who here's creative? And then, like three sheepish people halfway raise their hand, and then I say, okay, let's try it again. Who here is human? Let's go. Let's go, people. And think you're all human because it's an innate human capacity. It is actually our process of being conscious.
It's bringing in all of the surroundings, interpreting and experiencing the world, and making sense of the world as you move through it. It is actually a creative process.
[00:08:03] Speaker D: So through doctor basting's understanding, it's the work of the mind taking in and interpreting the world around us that makes us inherently creative creatures. In this way, art is not only something that makes us human, but also a way we might better understand the human mind. I think this is a good starting point for understanding why so many organizations from different backgrounds came together to make an arts festival about the mind happened. And as director of the chamber Music Society, Miles Cohen, told me, it all started with a funny coincidence.
[00:08:32] Speaker G: So in the summer of 21, I get approached by a good friend of ours who's a mezzo soprano who was spending time singing at the Marlboro Music School and festival in southern Vermont. And she says, I've been working on this project at Santa Fe, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. It was an incredibly moving experience when with a mezzo and a tenor and a clarinetist and a string quartet. And I said, so who's the composer? Mark Nykru. The composer that is one of the more well known american composers of a generation or two ago. It's been around for a while she said, but the two characters that are the main emphasis there is a musical component because the lead is a singer and the female and the lead male is her pianist. And then in offstage, they are husband and wife. I said, well, this sounds fantastic. I said, where are we going with this? She says, ah, well, the lead singer has early onset dementia.
And I said, oh, hmm. So she went on to tell me about how she personally related to the story because of her own family life and having walked through it, what it's like to have someone who has Alzheimer's dementia. Then, coincidentally, I come back from Vermont, and I get a phone call from our friends Judy and Alan Friedman. They said, we'd like to have lunch. We want to tell you about something we saw this summer. I had no idea where they were going with this. And it turns out they had been to see a song by Mahler, which is the name of this music theater performance. And they said, you should bring it to Philadelphia.
[00:10:02] Speaker D: Judy Brick Friedman and her husband, Allen Friedman, live in Philadelphia and often travel to Santa Fe for music.
[00:10:09] Speaker H: And it was in Santa Fe that we first heard this program of Mark Nykrook. A friend of ours, Doug Fitch, was directing. Doug is brilliant. And so we said, well, we don't know what that is, but if Doug's involved, we're going to go. And we were so impressed by the performance, the excellence of the musicianship, the concept, the relevance to current issues.
[00:10:42] Speaker I: The way that the piece works is the husband and wife are performers. And you see, over the course of this 70, 80 minutes event, the changing capabilities, capacities of the singer, who's also the wife. I think Jason concluded quite well when he saw it. It demonstrates on one hand, the passage of time and the impact on brain, on the person that's encumbered by this. And at the same time, the relationship changes and the tremendous stress that's placed upon the caregiver. And we saw that it had not been performed in Philadelphia. And so we went to Miles and proposed that he consider it.
[00:11:36] Speaker D: Once Miles was on board with the idea of bringing a song by Mahler to Philadelphia, the question became how to best put on the show. Judy suggested that given how affecting the topic was, the piece should have some way for the audience to engage with it. The group ultimately came up with the idea for a panel discussion following the performance and decided to reach out to the Penn memory Center to help with this aspect.
[00:11:57] Speaker I: And then when they got into Jason's hands, being somewhat uncovered in his expansiveness, he was able, in conjunction with Miles, to develop what we are very proud to say was an extraordinary two month program.
[00:12:13] Speaker F: And so I got on the Zoom call Doctor Carlowish.
It started out as a very ordinary, like, okay, well, we'll have a panel. And things just started to click because it became very clear to me that this piece was just not yet another artistic work about Alzheimer's that narrated, gee, how bad it is. But a very thoughtful treatment of what it is like to be a person living with this disease. What about some more work that surrounds this general topic of using the arts to better understand the answer to the essential question of mind perception? Which is, what is it like to be so immediately?
[00:12:52] Speaker G: Jason was like, let's partner. Let's do this together. And I said, oh, that would be phenomenal, but we can do more than this. Jason said. And I was like, okay. He's like, we should reach out to Jayatri Dos at Franklin Institute. I said, okay. I said, well, should we reach out to maybe free library and see if we can do some sort of book reading? He said, sure, we could do that, too. So basically, what we decided to make a long story long, was to take this idea and put a prism to it and kind of keep turning the prism and seeing it in different contexts so that when the audience came in, they would have a foundation that made it easier.
[00:13:30] Speaker D: So the stage was set for the arts on the mind festival. Returning to that first event at the Franklin Institute, Doctor Carlos and Doctor Basting's discussion of creativity in the mind was not just purely conceptual. In fact, doctor Basting, whose mother also has dementia, has used this notion to help access the minds of people whose cognition has been impaired by diseases like Alzheimer's. At the core of doctor Basting's work are what she calls beautiful questions. These are open ended questions meant to engage the mind and open up an opportunity for collective meaning making.
[00:14:03] Speaker E: The way I will explain it is just from my own personal experience of years and years of working in memory care centers or locked pulse farmers units, or sitting with my mom or other friends, which is, I can't process. I can't retrieve that word. In fact, I can get a word out. So I'm going to give you a sound.
It becomes a process of figuring out how to invite out the meaning making.
[00:14:32] Speaker D: Doctor Basting said it was during her visit to a locked Alzheimer's unit, where she first tried using beautiful questions and then improvisation to create a story with the patients.
[00:14:42] Speaker E: I just tore a picture out of a magazine, and it was a picture of the Marlboro man, like the classic Stetson profile. And I just said, what do you want to call him? And someone said, fred.
And I said, great, Fred. Fred. Is that right? Fred? Fred who? Fred Astaire. Awesome. Where would you like to say he lives? There's no right or wrong answer. You could say anything you want, and I will weave it into this story. Oklahoma. And then someone started to say, sing Oklahoma. Sing with me.
Oh, Glahoma where the go sweeping down the plane. And then I just echoed that. And then I would repeat all of the answers that had come out in like a wave, so that the moment of creativity, access to the point of contribution, was always right in front of them. And you do that in. They could have given movement, they could have given sounds, and in fact, they did. And I would just echo them all and weave them together and always present them with another question after I had brought the moment of creative engagement back to them, so that they were at the point of entry. Always at the point of entry.
[00:16:02] Speaker D: Doctor Basing's work shows us not only how creativity can help us access the minds of those with damaged cognition, but how it connects with all of us. Here's Mark Nykrug, director of a song by Mahler, discussing the way he sees his music reaching audiences.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: The power of music is not only inevitable, but there's no defense against it. You cannot unhear what's going on. And the power of that underlying this story is what really makes the impact. The story that the music tells is always more real and more honest than anything you can put into words, because there's no translation. We're not listening to speech and translating into thought. The music is its own direct contact to your emotional being.
[00:17:05] Speaker D: For Miles Cohen, this connection and intense intimacy is a central aspect of chamber music.
[00:17:12] Speaker G: Chamber music, to me, is a conversation between two musicians, and usually somewhere up to twelve musicians. But it's typically a very intimate conversation between two and four or six people, and they are inviting an audience into that conversation to be a part of it.
[00:17:29] Speaker D: This invitation to conversation and reflection seemed to arise with each of the performances of arts in the mind. Here's Judy and Alan Friedman again, talking about the experience of going to the events at the festival.
[00:17:41] Speaker H: One of the things we noticed is that we were seeing some of the same couples over and over in each of the venues and realized that caregiver and cognitive impaired person were looking to us and wondering which of us was the caregiver and which of us might be the one cognitively impaired. And it allowed us an excuse for introspection about our own feelings.
In relation to the issues that are raised for the caregiver and the person with dementia. It's like, oh, is it me? No, it's him. It's not him, it's not me. But what if it were?
[00:18:30] Speaker I: For me, it was the end performance. As we said earlier, Judy had asked that there be some sort of talkback afterwards. And so there we were in the Brolin theater, which we've been in maybe not 100 times, but close. And usually in a talkback, you have ten people, 20 people, that are either related or to the performers or really die hard. And we looked around and I would say 80% of the people were there for the post performance discussion. And to me, it really showed how much the event was more than just a performance, that it was a communal moment where people could come and think about this issue, how it's affecting them and how it's affecting other people.
[00:19:27] Speaker D: Whether it's Doctor Basting's beautiful questions, Mark Nykruk's song by Mahler, or the collaborative process creating the arts in the mind festival, it seems it's this communal creativity that engages the mind and leads us towards greater empathy for one another.
I think Doctor Carlos said it best.
[00:19:44] Speaker F: Acts of creativity and or witnessing creative acts are really, you know, those moments when our mind is fully being a human mind.
[00:20:03] Speaker C: Telling the story of arts of the mind could have gone for hours. And there were so many things involved in the this festival. I thought this was a really nice summary of sort of the reasons behind the event. I appreciated Doctor Carlo Wish's summary where he said that the point of the arts of the Mind festival was to use the arts to better understand the question, what is it like to be? I think one of the main mistakes people make when they talk about using arts for older adults living with cognitive impairment is they think of the arts as a babysitter, a way to pass the time that is different than sitting someone down in front of a television. And that's not what we wanted. It's not what the Friedmans envisioned. It's not what Miles Cohen envisioned. Whether people were creating or consuming art, the festival really provided these countless opportunities for people to see themselves in art, to see themselves in a community of artists, or to see themselves in a community that appreciates art. Anne Basting described it as creative engagement. This is sort of an autobiography on display rather than a hobby, or just a way to pass the time.
[00:21:29] Speaker B: I think that doing this story, I really came to understand just how much arts can connect with anybody. I think Anne basing, talking about her work and the way that she uses art and improv and creativity to kind of connect with older adults is really powerful. It's like those videos of people listening to music from when they were 20 and they light up. It's such a universal experience. The way that arthem can connect with us and bring us back to something that is, it's beyond words, it's beyond our ability to actually articulate speech. And when that part of your cognitive ability is lost, you see how much.
[00:22:14] Speaker D: Art is intrinsic to who we are.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: By the way, that it can connect with us still.
[00:22:19] Speaker C: Yeah. And it is universal. It's been more than a decade since I first interviewed for this job in Doctor Carlowish's office, but I remember talking about my own grandmother's experience long after she was diagnosed with dementia, listening to Chopin. And as I described earlier, I was a mediocre at best pianist, but really emphasized learning a lot of Chopin because it was one of the few things that could sort of get a reaction out of my grandmother still at that time. And as a high school student experiencing this, I thought, isn't it nice to see that she can still react to music? But now, through the lens of arts and the mind, it's clearer that it's less about her just recalling music from before, and it's more of us getting a glimpse at who she was as an adult before her diagnosis, and seeing that that person remains, that she is not a different person because of a diagnosis. It's just we have different pathways to access that person.
Doctor Karlovitch also referred to specifically the opera of a song by Mahler as a thoughtful treatment of what it's like to live with this disease. And I really like that idea of arts as a treatment, as something you could prescribe. I'm picturing our neurologists writing down on a piece of paper, a prescription for Lakembe and two operas, and it's trivial, but I do think that we can think of the arts as part of a treatment plan moving forward.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: While doing this piece, I was also having a sort of creativity inception or something as I was working on it, because it was so funny to listen to people talking about creativity and then hearing the very creative, collaborative way that the whole festival came together. It was just, it was such an act of creativity. They had no idea where it was going when they were doing it. And then for me to be another layer removed, editing all of this audio together and choosing which interviews to put where, and talking to different people, it was just like such an example of humans as meaning making machines. We are constantly organizing and reorganizing and throwing out ideas and seeing what sticks.
[00:24:48] Speaker C: One thing that I regret about all this is that we didn't have a lot of time to talk about all of the other elements of the festival, and certainly there's extensive coverage up on the Penn Memory center website, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well, but some highlights from it. For me personally, we're having the mezzo soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano performing not just on stage for a song by Mahler, but at our memory cafe for some of our patients and their caregivers. When she's saying you'll never walk alone, there were very few dry eyes in the audience there. I also really love the diversity of art, both the visual arts and music, and art creation at the Woodmere Museum in partnership with our good Friends Arts Philadelphia, and then of course, the documentary by Raya Tajiri that was shown at the Philadelphia Film center. This was a first person perspective about being an adult caregiver for a mother living with Dementia. It's a very powerful film, followed by a strong discussion getting back to doctor Carlowicz's original point of what is it like to be both patient and caregiver in that moment? The festival itself was a one time thing. We're not planning on on repeating that the way that it was. However, we are planning on having arts and the mind be much more involved in everything that we do. Moving forward, we'll have more engagement with the arts community. We're working with an art therapy group who is interested in spending more time with our patients. There's countless opportunities all over the city, and I think what we're learning here is that the arts community in Philadelphia and beyond is interested in making their work accessible to older adults, particularly those living with cognitive impairment.
[00:26:40] Speaker B: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Age of Aging. The Age of Aging podcast is supported by the Penn Memory center, the University of Pennsylvania Alzheimer's Disease Research center, the Institute on Aging, and the Penn FTD center.
[00:26:53] Speaker C: For this episode, we want to thank those who helped make the arts and the mind festival possible, including Ann Basting, Miles Cohenous, Jayatri Das, Judy and Allen Friedman, Jennifer Johnson Kanow, Jason Carloish, Dasha Kipper, Mark Nykrook, Susan Shifrin, and Raya Tajiri. Our partner organizations for the festival were the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Franklin Institute, the Free Library of Philadelphia Arts Philadelphia, the Woodmere Art Museum, the Philadelphia Film center, and the Kimmel center.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Contributors include myself and Terrence Casey, as well as Nicola Kalkoveckia, Dalia El Saeed, Marie, engineer Jason Carlowish, Emily Largent, Meg.
[00:27:35] Speaker D: McCarthy, and Megan Sharp.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: More information on the stories you heard today can be found in our show notes and on our website, penmemorycenter.org dot.
