December 5, 2001

Heart to Harp provides healthy music to the ears

By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
       Please make this harp sing for other women.
      Make this harp sing.
      Surround this harp with music from the soul.
      Please make this harp sing.
      Inspired by a woman she never met, musician Deb West wrote a song last month about a woman whose courage and legacy live on in the music of a small number of area harpists.
      West attended her first Heart to Harp workshop last month at the Palliative Care Center on Old Mission Peninsula, held on the day of Catherine Sackett's funeral. When she heard center founder Sharon Olson talk that day about Catherine - her desire to play the harp so she could offer therapeutic music to others and her donation of her harp to the center when her terminal cancer meant she could not - West was very moved.
      Driving home, with Catherine's harp beside her on loan from the center, the song began to take shape.
      "Here this woman had cancer and wanted to learn to play the harp and when I was coming home with her harp, I could feel Catherine's presence," West said. "We're going to record it on Friday and go sing it to the family and give them the tape and music. She inspired a lot of us."
      West, a social worker with the Area Agency on Aging and Munson Hospice, has been a friend and fellow musical traveler with Sharon Olson for a few years.
      When Olson began offering her Heart to Harp workshops this fall, West signed up. A guitar player, West wanted to learn the harp as well as deepen her knowledge and practice of therapeutic music, a growing interest of hers.
      "You can play the harp the first time you sit down with it," said West, who enjoys the healing, soothing resonance of the instrument, which rests against a player's heart.
      "I've always been a musician but the difference is that my music has gone from entertainment to healing music where the focus is on the person I'm singing for. It is presented as a gift."
      A nurse practitioner, Olson believes her love of the harp and her knowledge of therapeutic music can be a gift to others. As part of her Palliative Care Center, which she founded in 1999, she offers palliative music to people with chronic or terminal illnesses and to caregivers.
      After numerous requests from the cancer patients she played for, Olson decided to offer harp workshops so others can learn this ancient Greek form of modal music. She began this fall to search for funding and harps for her prospective students.
      However, time ran out for Catherine, who was eager to be one of her first students. Olson says she profoundly regrets that she began offering her workshops just too late for Catherine, whom she met during a regular weekly volunteer session playing at a local oncology clinic. But she has used that memory to inspire her to continue her work teaching the harp.
      "Catherine and her harp have become sort of a legacy for me," she said. "It was too late for her but maybe it is not too late for others."
      Olson's second Heart to Harp session Saturday morning drew seven aspiring harpists. To help defray the costs of the Celtic folk harps she uses, Olson is working on a grant to provide additional instruments with a focus on women with breast cancer.
      Calling the harp and the modal method a very easy way to get people playing an instrument, she points to studies showing how therapeutic music can help promote relaxation and healing. She believes these benefits are possible for both players and listeners.
      "The music can hopefully bring people to a better place for healing, even if a cure is not possible," Olson said.
      Olson first turned to the harp 18 years ago looking for some personal healing and balance to a challenging nursing career in hospice care in Lansing. Without any musical background she began taking lessons and instantly took to the instrument. She found it a much-needed break from her time spent steeped in issues of terminal illness and grief.
      "Early on, when the hospice movement was just getting started, we ate, slept and thought hospice," she recalled. "For that first lesson, for an hour and a half, I did not hear the word death, did not hear the word dying; it was a real break."
      New to the world of music, Joan Liberti is an aspiring harpist who has first-hand knowledge of the benefits of harp playing - from both sides of the strings.
      Struggling with the effects of ongoing chemotherapy for cancer of the peritoneum, Liberti has participated in music therapy with Olson during her hospital stays.
      "I really looked forward to it, it helps the anxiety and you relax and let go," she said. "That is so important, especially in the hospital where it is not conducive to relaxation. I know I felt better afterwards, sort of soothed."
      She was so moved by the music that she began playing the music herself a few months ago. Liberti even bought herself a harp and attends Olson's Heart to Harp workshops, hoping to one day share the music with other people with cancer.
      "With playing the music it as opened a whole new world for me," Liberti said. "Playing is soothing as long as you don't get hung up on being a perfectionist."
      "It's been real exciting to start something new and begin to understand music better, it's never too late."