Soothing Strings: Harp music provides a therapeutic assist to the ill

The silvery sounds of a harp floated through a hospital corridor, reducing the beeping pagers, ringing telephones and conversations to background noise.

Dayle Olson, the man playing the soothing melodies, is a student in the International Harp Training Program, a program that trains students to offer comfort through harp music. Students come from all over the country and across the world to study with Christina Tourin, the founder and director of the nonprofit program that is based in San Diego.

Olson, who is from Viera, Fla., has been a lifelong music lover, and he has played the harp for about three years. He decided to join the program because, "It fit exactly with what I wanted to do -- use music to the benefit of others. This music touches the souls of other people."

Olson, 56, and nine other harpists spent a recent training session at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center as part of their two-year course. They were led by Tourin. Training sessions take place around the world.

The idea behind harp therapy is to use the music to help patients heal physically, mentally and spiritually.

"Doctors and nurses can do everything physically to put a person together, but unless the person wants to heal, they won't get well," Tourin said. "We need artists, musicians, poets and dancers to come in and elevate the mind. When the mind is elevated, then the real healing begins."

Tourin first presented her program to the medical center in 2003, said Dr. Richard McQuellon, a psychologist and the director of the psychosocial oncology and cancer-patient support programs at the medical center. He was impressed.

"We know in our work here that music makes a big difference in the way people feel, particularly in a hospital environment that is noisy," McQuellon said. "Noise is not particularly conducive to healing, but music can be, particularly the music and the vibrations that come from the harp."

After Tourin's presentation, the medical center hired a harp therapist, who remained until last year. Now a volunteer harp therapist, Amelia Gerlach, plays for patients in treatment areas, mostly in the cancer center.

McQuellon has since become an instructor in Tourin's program. He teaches students how to talk to patients and how to listen to those who are undergoing treatment and experiencing life-threatening illnesses.

Studies done in San Diego have shown that the music helps patients by reducing anxiety, easing breathing and decreasing pain, Tourin said.

Tourin, the daughter of a harpist, started playing as a child. By the age of 7, she was performing on television. In high school, she played with symphonies and on Broadway. She studied music in Austria and Montreal, and played for 17 years at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vt., an inn with live music started by the von Trapp family of The Sound of Music fame.

She discovered the harp's power to heal in 1989 when her father was hospitalized. She played for him and other patients, and doctors started to notice that her playing benefited their patients. She founded the training program, which now has more than 400 graduates, in 1995. Students study mostly through online lessons, books and DVDs, spend time in hospitals at the beginning and end of the course, and serve 80-hour internships playing harps in therapeutic settings under the supervision of an approved mentor. Tuition is $2,400.

People who enter the program have followed one of two tracks, Tourin said. They have either always played music and want to learn about the medical use of it, specifically harp music, or they are already in the medical field and want to learn to use the harp therapeutically. About one-third of her students get paying jobs after they graduate, she said. Their positions are usually paid for by grants and from donations from families who have seen the benefits of harp music.

Another one-third work as volunteer therapeutic harpists, and the remainder take the course for their own benefit, Tourin said. Her program is one of five in the United States. She is able to take up to 45 students for each module of training, and she holds four modules each year.

"Our goal is to have a therapeutic harpist by 2020 in every hospital and hospice," she said. With nearly 5,000 hospitals and several thousand hospices in the United States, her goal is ambitious. But she is confident because students that graduate from her program and others are starting their own programs. The growth is exponential, she said.

"We'll get there."

At the medical center, Tourin and several of her charges, carrying portable harps slung over their shoulders, visited patients in their rooms. Others provided impromptu concerts in hallways and at nurses' stations.

Tourin explained how harpists determine what to play for patients. They first gauge their moods. Do they need uplifting, or has something unsettling just happened? Do they need calming?

They choose a song's tempo to match the patient's breathing. If a patient is short of breath, she said, the harpists may decrease the tempo in hopes that the patient will match that tempo and breath slower and deeper.

They ask patients what type of music they like -- their repertoires include Broadway, pop, country, opera, classical, patriotic and hymns. And they work to find the patient's "resonant tone," the tone that will create a feeling of harmony. Tourin takes her cues from a patient's voice.

"For sure, you know when you don't have it," she said. "The person will react." When she hits the right tone, a peacefulness comes over the patient, she said. She demonstrated her knack for finding the tone with patient Barbara McDonald, who recently had surgery.

"I was able to find your tone," Tourin told her. "I heard you talking."

."Does that feel good to you?" she asked. McDonald hesitated, then said that her voice that day sounded a little lower than normal. "I'll bring it up a little bit," Tourin said. "I invite you to close your eyes for a minute and relax."

McDonald said she liked all kinds of music, so Tourin chose "My Heart Will Go On," the theme song from the movie Titanic.

"That sounds good," McDonald said. "It's pretty. It's so soothing."

When Tourin finished, she asked McDonald if she had ever played the harp. She hadn't, although harps fascinate her, McDonald said. Tourin showed McDonald how to strum the upper parts of the strings as Tourin played the melody of "Amazing Grace" on the lower ones.

While Tourin visited patient rooms, a group of her students played a hauntingly beautiful version of "Greensleeves" in a hospital breezeway. Nancy-Elizabeth Nimmick, 65, is a hospice social worker from Oakland, Md., who loves music. She decided to enter the program, she said, because she thought the harp would complement the clinical services that hospice offers.

"I love it," she said. "Even the scales sound pretty when I play it." She joined in as the harpists played and sang a round of "Tender Shepherd." With each additional voice and harp, the sound deepened and grew richer.

Hospital visitors stopped to listen. They smiled.

"It's not about angels and harps and heaven," Tourin said. "It's about helping each other through tough times." And harp music isn't always the music that people respond to, she said. "Some need drums. Some need cellos. Some need flutes.

"A lot need harps."

■ Janice Gaston can be reached at 727-7364 or at jgaston@wsjournal.com.

■ For more information about the International Harp Therapy Program, check the group's Web site at www.harprealm.com.