‘Music can bring back memories for dementia sufferers’

Columnist Melissa Todd tells of some of the magic moments she experiences as a music therapist during workshops at residential homes...

Pre-covid my main job was offering music therapy workshops in residential homes. I say job, but “one woman flash mob expressing cry for help” is closer to reality. I’d turn up to around 20 different care homes, a suitcase of tambourines, maracas, song sheets and conducting batons trailing messily in my wake. 80% of my work was with the elderly; the rest, adults with learning difficulties. I enjoyed both enormously. More singing with the elderly, more leaping about with the youngsters, both suited me fine: as long as I’ve an audience I’m happy. I missed it horribly when they turned me and my sticky instruments from their doors, much as I understood the need: I was the very definition of a super spreader.

Slowly, timidly, it’s creeping back. I’ve been delighted to encounter many of the same faces - staff and residents both - to slot back into the same old grooves, remembering who loves The Beatles, who runs out screaming when I play Ed Sheeran. All the homes insist on my showing a test at the door; most insist I still wear a mask, which makes singing, particularly while leaping about, pretty exhausting. But it’s a joy and a delight to be starting up again under any conditions. I always leave work pumped up with energy and giddy with glee. Making people happy makes you happy. A simple truth and a rare privilege.

From 20 homes pre-pandy I’ve inveigled myself back into seven. That leaves a lot of hours of noisy, meaningless telly, or disturbed residents shouting and sobbing - both of which I regularly encounter when I swan up with my song sheets. And of course, there are hundreds more residential homes where a music therapist is an unimaginable luxury, particularly the smaller, less well-funded homes, and plenty of elderly people left alone in their own homes too, for endless lonely hours. Here a dementiafriendly radio show, such as Reminiscence Radio, which I wholeheartedly recommend, can work similar miracles. It’s free, easily accessible, and helped a lot of lonely people through lockdown.

Music accesses a place deeper than words. I once watched an elderly man who’d forgotten how to speak suddenly start to sing. A beautiful, plummy bass, caressing a song he’d learnt in his childhood, while his wife looked on incredulous, sobbing and beaming to a sound she’d thought forever lost. Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience - a song you haven’t thought about in 30 years crashes back into your mind, and you find you can remember every note and word. More than that, the smell of the school you attended at the time, the taste of the lunch, the faint cramp of fear in your guts at the thought of double maths. Emotions and memories are stored in our limbic system, where we register sensations and feelings. If you’ve ever been through a truly horrific situation - a car crash, say you’ll find that the memory is filed and recalled not so much with language, but instead with sensory information: the sound of crunching metal, the smell of petrol, the feel of your heart hammering painfully against your ribcage. Trauma victims are often haunted by vivid memories of sensations, stored deep beneath their reasoning, articulate selves. Here music can enter and heal. And for dementia patients, who often lose their grip on language as the disease progresses, music can provide a supremely powerful outlet. Often I’ve been privileged to see residents locked in to themselves, unable to articulate their pain and fear, begin to laugh or cry to a piece which reminds them of their lost love, wedding day or mother, while their relatives look on in amazement and gratitude, as though I’m some sort of wizard. But I’m just the one pressing play. Music is the miracle worker, not me.

And the word miracle isn’t hyperbolic. Plato wrote that of all things that belong to the

spiritual realm, beauty is the one easiest to perceive here on earth, and we need no special training to love it, nor be improved by it.

Melissa Todd holds music therapy workshops on the Isle