Songs to heal the soul
“As soon as we began to play, people would stop and say thank you, and sometimes cry.”
Dr Mya Cubitt is an emergency physician, an acute medical unit consultant and the mother of three lively primary and preschool-aged kids. She smiles with her heart and her pale blue eyes. She has worked through the pandemic at The Royal Melbourne Hospital, she’s been a COVID patient herself, and now she’s trying to explain how these past two years have affected her.
“There’s this graph of the emotional phases of a pandemic, and it goes like this,” she begins, waving her arms up and down like a heaving sea. “That’s my experience. There are moments when you have this anticipatory anxiety and there are moments when you feel like a true hero, mainly because you connect with another human being and make them feel like you care. There are moments when you just want to curl up in a corner and rock, and there are other moments when you feel like you’re starting to rebuild, and you might be able to face it again. It just keeps going.
“I worked in the emergency department and also in the acute medical unit, where we were looking after patients with confirmed COVID. I think some of the hardest days of my career have come from working on that ward, and having Scrub Choir quite frankly saved me.”
That’s what Scrub Choir was made for. Dr Emma O’Brien OAM, founder of this band of medico-choristers, has worked at The Royal as a music therapist for 23 years. With her bouncy magenta curls, her tenacity and her enthusiasm for life, she has brought music to every corner of the hospital.
“Prior to COVID,” she explains, “as music therapists we were clinically on the wards, working in palliative care, playing music to people who were dying, helping them to write songs, playing to people who couldn’t speak but they could sing. We also had volunteers playing live music in the corridors. If you walked into Royal Melbourne, you’d be shocked if you weren’t confronted by a harpist. It was gorgeous.
“Then, when COVID was on its way, there was a kind of unsteadiness that was really tangible in the hospital. We had to be prepared for the worst possible scenario. And with all the trepidation, the hospital stopped our volunteers. It felt so quiet and so tense. So I said to my staff, ‘I think we should step up now and play where we’d normally put volunteers’. This was during our first lockdown, and as soon as we began to play, people would stop and say thank you, and sometimes they would cry.
It’s this extraordinary impact of live music that just hits people in their soul.”
Then, one day someone asked Emma if she’d seen Couch Choir, which was an online community choir that had been gathered together by the Brisbane group, Pub Choir, when they could no longer play live shows.
“I looked them up and watched them singing Close to You, and then I cried,” Emma admits. “And I thought, ‘we could give that a go here’.”
So Emma spread the word. “I was expecting maybe 20 people to respond, but we were flooded,” she recalls. “We ended up having more than 200 people join in the first Scrub Choir song, Bruno Mars’ Count On Me. It blew my socks off.” And from there the momentum rolled on.
An Intensive Care nurse and violinist, Sonia Baldock pulled together a string ensemble among the surgeons. They recorded their parts for the second Scrub Choir song in an unused operating theatre on the day the Melbourne housing commission towers were locked down. “Some of the hardest
times of my career were during that second lockdown,” she told Emma. “I was working with some of the sickest in ICU, but I also helped out in a ward that had lost all its staff [as a result of a COVID outbreak]. Watching older adults pass away alone was heart-wrenching … and Scrub Choir meant a lot to me.”
There are reasons we gravitate towards music in times of distress. “Music is processed in our brains differently from everything else,” Emma explains. “In fact, it’s the most complete experience a human being can have in their brain. If I stuck you under a functional MRI and said, ‘sing this’, your brain would go off everywhere. Even if you have impaired vision, the occipital lobes will light up. It’s like fireworks going off. It’s so healing because it’s so human and so comprehensive.”
Scrub Choir’s take on Count On Me wasn’t only a remedy for distressed staff, it was an instant hit. To date it’s had 69,500 views on YouTube. They followed up with The Pretenders’
I’ll Stand by You which has reached almost 85,000 views. And then they were invited to perform Ben Lee’s
We’re All in This Together live at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.
It was, says Emma, a former opera singer, “an absolute highlight. We went onstage and the audience was screaming out, ‘We love you Royal Melbourne Hospital Scrub Choir!’ We did the hand gestures and the audience started copying us. It was like ‘oh my goodness’ and half of us were nearly in tears.”
The reason for Scrub Choir, Emma insists, is “to support healthcare workers through really difficult times because, if you don’t care for the carer, then the carer can’t care for the patient”. But that night on stage it became clear that the power of their music had also reached out beyond the hospital walls.
“I think COVID fractures our sense of community,” Emma explains. “All our networks, our connections are gone. We’re all scared, we’re working hard and then going home and not seeing our families and everything is changing day to day. Scrub Choir connected us in a common thing. We’ve realised we’re part of a much wider community. It’s not just singing. Choir means ‘together’. I hope people continue to realise the absolute value of being connected as community. It’s vital for human beings.”
Today more than 500 Royal Melbourne staff are signed up on the Scrub Choir social media page, with around 80 regular singers and musicians. There are plans for collaborations with other hospitals nationally and abroad, and a new song out for Christmas.
Emma believes that, even in a post-pandemic world, there will be a role for Scrub Choir. As Mya says, her regular job in the emergency ward is fast-paced and stressful, and almost every person she makes contact with is experiencing the very worst day of their lives. Scrub Choir could help with those pressures too.
“Scrub Choir was the most healing thing I did [during COVID],” she says finally, “and every time I did it reinforced why I should do it again.”
Mya and Sonia’s quotes originally appeared in ‘Scrub Choir – We are all in this together’ panel presentation (O’Brien & Sutu, 2021).