Nun renowned for popularizing field of music therapy
Once, while Donna Marie Beck was a young girl, she was in the middle of a piano lesson when her teacher, a nun, accidentally knocked the sheet music off its stand while Ms. Beck was playing. The book fell to the floor. But the girl kept on playing.
“The nun said, ‘How did you do that?’” recalled Ms. Beck’s sister, Carolyn Nickerson. “And she said, ‘I don’t know!’”
It was an early sign of what was to come for Sister Donna Marie, who died Wednesday in Baden, the home of the Sisters of St. Joseph motherhouse. She was 87.
Over time, she became not only a talented organist and pianist but also a beloved music teacher and pioneer in the field of music therapy, helping to popularize it in the area. All the while, she maintained a profound connection between her faith and her love of music, which she called her “servant source.”
Sister Donna Marie was born the third of nine children in Gallitzin, Cambria County, to a Catholic family that prized music as a virtue all its own. She entered the convent and became a nun in 1949 and started teaching music in the Diocese of Pittsburgh schools. As a teacher, Sister Donna Marie demanded the most out of her students. In recent remembrances on Facebook, some former students at Monongahela Valley Catholic High School recalled her threatening to “jump down your throat and dance on your liver” if they did not pay close attention.
Sister Donna Marie also showed them deep compassion. A lover of Broadway shows, she was put in charge of auditions for the school’s plays but found herself unable to reject any of the students who tried out.
“She had such a soft heart and held such confidence that there was something everybody had to offer — she couldn’t sort among them,” said Ms. Nickerson of Cresson, Cambria County.
Sister Donna Marie eventually became drawn to the burgeoning field of music therapy, becoming one of the first students to earn a certification from Duquesne University’s music therapy program in 1976. She earned a doctorate from Duquesne, writing her thesis on the links between music and existential phenomenology: the way our subjective experience reflects our personal values and relationships.
Sister Donna Marie practiced music therapy with patients who were autistic, with children who had been abandoned by their families, with adults suffering from severe anxiety or depression. She worked with comatose patients, researching what kind of music the person had enjoyed while conscious.
This personalized approach saw results. Linda Sanders, a friend and colleague, remembered an instance in which Sister Donna Marie visited a patient who had been considered unresponsive, bringing along a stringed instrument called an autoharp. Sister Donna Marie began to play at the woman’s bedside.
“The patient turns her body and reaches toward the autoharp,” Ms. Sanders recalled. “That told Sister Donna that she could hear — she just had a hard time responding.”
Sister Donna Marie worked to institutionalize music therapy as a discipline. Her scholarship on the theory of music therapy was published widely, and she established programs at Marywood College in Scranton, at various elder care homes, and at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. She taught for decades at Duquesne, where she served as director of the music therapy department.
“In that role, she encountered so many students coming through but had a way of knowing you individually and uniquely,” said Brigette Sutton, a student of Sister Donna Marie’s at Duquesne who works as a music therapist.
The kind of music therapy that Sister Donna Marie taught her students was intertwined with spirituality. “She would say that dissonance is a call to transcendence,” Ms. Sutton said. “Those moments of tension in life are actually the moments that call you forward to become something more.”
Facing moments of dissonance in her own life, Sister Donna Marie returned to that same approach. As her own mother neared the end of her life, Sister Donna Marie read up on music thanatology. (Thanatology is the scientific study of death.) She visited her mother and played recordings of “celestial harp music,” Ms. Nickerson recalled. “She would talk softly and quietly and reassure my mother that she was loved, that it would be OK, everything would work out,” Ms. Nickerson said. “She was evoking the disposition that you need to take with you to die well.”
Sister Donna Marie retired from Duquesne in 2008, continuing to work part time as a professor emerita. She remained mentally and musically sharp until her death, though she was physically slowed by complications of diabetes.
Shortly before her death, Ms. Nickerson said, several of Sister Donna Marie’s relatives — gifted musicians themselves — visited her at her home at the Sisters of St. Joseph in Baden. Her sister, Maureen Beck of Baltimore, and a nephew played guitar, while a niece played ukulele. They sang, and Sister Donna Marie, though she’d grown weak, sang along.
“We did a little therapy for her,” Ms. Nickerson said.
Friends will be received from 1 p.m. to the close of the 6 p.m. prayer vigil Sunday and from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday before the funeral Mass at the motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Joseph, 1020 State St., Baden. Donations in her memory may be sent to the Sisters of St. Joseph Memorial Fund, Development Office, at the motherhouse, Baden, Pa. 15005.