In the summer of 2012, after trading the high-stress life of a government press secretary for that of an independent writer, I began a second new chapter in my life: playing piano in the lobby of a hospital in the city where I live.
I was there as a volunteer, and my official title was music therapy aide. My mission was to provide soothing music that would bring a measure of calm to my listeners, many of whom were at the hospital because someone they loved was seriously ill.
The piano—a gleaming black Yamaha baby grand with a CD player function for those times when live musicians were unavailable—was tucked into a corner of the lobby at the hospital's main entrance. To the left of the piano there was a pay telephone and an ATM, and to the piano’s immediate right—less than two feet away—there was a Plexiglas divider separating the lobby from a set of elevators to the patient floors. On the far side of the ATM was a small snack bar that offered packaged sandwiches, salads, cookies, coffee and juice.
Source: Piano and Music Book Photograph Copyright © 2016 By Susan Hooper
The position of the piano forced me to play with my back to the lobby and the hospital’s front door. This arrangement suited me just fine, however—in part because, in my first months on the job, I was one of the world's most nervous piano players. Except for one or two extremely brief occasions, I had never played in public before. I had just enough bravado to embark on this musical adventure, but not enough left over to convince myself that I was any good.
A loveseat, two armchairs and a coffee table were grouped behind the piano bench. The snack bar had another six or seven tables and stools, and the expansive lobby beyond the snack bar was filled with even more armchairs. Yet, as long as I focused on the music I was playing and did not turn around, I could remain more or less blissfully unaware of how many people behind me might be listening at any given time.
There were, however, several sets of eyes I could not avoid: those of the people waiting by the elevators on the other side of the Plexiglas divider to my right. This group generally included a mix of doctors, nurses and other hospital staff; visitors; and, on some days, even patients. Until the elevators arrived, I served as a brief distraction for them—exactly on a par with the colorful fish swimming endless circles in a tabletop aquarium.
Children especially were unabashed at coming right up to the Plexiglas and staring straight at me, eyes wide. Sometimes they would call out in amazement, “Someone is playing the piano!” They were invariably so adorable that it was impossible to ignore them, and when I could I would give them what I hoped was a cheery grin—even though, in my first months on the job, I was always fearful of losing my place in my music if I did so.
The hospital where I volunteered is in a city with a population of just under 50,000. More than half of the city’s residents are African American, nearly 20 percent of residents identify as Hispanic, and just under 35 percent live in poverty, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. The hospital, which was founded in 1873, serves a broad variety of communities—nearby inner-city neighborhoods, a gritty former steel town five miles south of the city, rural communities to the north and west, as well as several middle-class suburbs beyond the city limits. Because this is a teaching hospital, furthermore, there is always a small flock of young doctors in training—many of them women and minorities. Thus, my view through the Plexiglas was of an inspiring cross-section of American society, with people of many different skin tones, dress styles, languages, ages and backgrounds standing together in quiet harmony as they waited for the elevator ride to the patient floors.
My own family had relied on the hospital several times over the years. Sadly, my father died there six weeks after suffering a stroke in 1983. Happily, my two nephews were born there in the 1990s. My mother spent several weeks there in 2003 after a hip fracture. And I had been a patient for three days in 2008 following an allergic reaction to a flu shot.
But I wasn’t consciously thinking of the city’s diverse mix of residents or my family associations when I dreamed up the idea of playing the piano in the lobby. I just thought, perhaps naively, that I might be able to play as well as the CD player function on the Yamaha, which I had heard now and then on previous visits to the hospital. I also thought that playing there, as an unpaid volunteer, might be the perfect antidote to the stresses of my more than seven years as a government spokesperson and my six years of helping to care for my mother at the end of her life.
When I started playing in the lobby, my bag of musical tricks consisted almost entirely of tunes from the Great American Songbook—those classics of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s from the inventive pens of George and Ira Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II and their cohorts. These are my favorite songs, and I wanted to share them with listeners. I must hasten to explain, however, that I have extremely limited skills at the piano. I can play only if I have music in front of me, the arrangements must be easy to read, and anything I play in public requires hours and hours of practice at home.
And yet, almost from my first weeks of playing, the response from listeners was extraordinary. During my two-hour shifts each Wednesday afternoon, rarely a week would pass that a listener did not stop by the piano to comment on my playing. Sometimes it was just a brief, “Thank you for your music.” One afternoon, moments before I started playing, a woman appeared out of nowhere with a miniature orchid in a tiny pot. She said, “Thank you for what you are doing,” and put the orchid on the piano next to my music books. I looked at her, astonished. “But you haven’t heard me play a note yet!” I said. She just smiled and replied, “My mother played the piano.” And then she was disappeared as swiftly as she had arrived.
Many times listeners told me that my music was "soothing" or "relaxing" or "peaceful." One cold day in late March, I was playing Ellington’s “I’m So in Love With You” when I became aware that a man was standing in front of the ATM to my left, watching me. He was in his late 50s—a thin white man with grey hair and glasses, wearing a short silver-gray ski jacket and brown pants. He stood absolutely still as I played, and when I finished he said, simply, “Thank you.” Then he made a small bow, said, “Thank you” again, paused, and added, “It soothes the soul.” As I thanked him in return, he smiled, made another bow, and then walked away across the lobby.
Another afternoon, toward the end of my shift, I became aware that someone was standing slightly behind me on my left. When I finished the piece I was playing, I turned to see a white-haired man wearing a navy blue blazer, charcoal grey slacks, a white button-down shirt and a navy blue tie.
“If I didn’t have to go to work, I would like to just sit here and listen,” he said, with no preamble.
The only thing I could think to say, as he was already turning to go, was, “You should! You should play a little hooky!”
But more often than not, a brief thank you would turn into a much longer conversation. Some visitors would segue from talking about my music to telling me about the loved one they were visiting in the hospital—a wife, a sibling, a friend. Then, in response to what I hoped were gentle questions from me, they would go on to tell me about their children, their jobs, their hobbies, their gardens. They seemed to welcome this chance for a brief respite from their bedside vigils. Luckily for me, the volunteer office encouraged me to talk to visitors in this way. “That’s part of your job!” my supervisor said cheerfully.
Source: Yamaha Logo and Piano Keys Photograph Copyright © 2016 By Susan Hooper
Many of my listeners were musicians themselves—including trumpet players, guitarists and other pianists. They were only too eager to share stories about their own love of music. One man, a trumpet player in his early 60s, told me he had recently taken up the bagpipe; he practiced in the early morning hours in his office before his co-workers arrived. One woman, an organist with a Methodist church in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, told me that her grandmother and her brother were both concert pianists, and then she praised my interpretation of the tunes I was playing. Given her background, I was especially gratified—and surprised—by her encouragement.
One January afternoon, as I was playing “Thanks for the Memory,” a tall, husky white man wearing a black knit cap loomed up on the elevator side of the Plexiglas and mouthed something to me that I could not hear. I smiled and kept playing, not knowing what else to do. Seconds later, he appeared at my left elbow.
“Bob Hope. Vietnam Tour. 1969,” he said, in a sharp, staccato rhythm, pausing at the end of each statement. “That’s the last time I heard that song.”
I was so taken aback by his revelation that I was momentarily speechless. Finally, I blurted out, “I'm so sorry. I hope I didn't bring back bad memories for you." He said, in a matter-of-fact tone, "Oh, there aren't any good memories. But this doesn't bring 'em back." And then we started a lively conversation about radio stations in the area that play classical music and jazz.
In the summer of 2014, I shared in the anxiety of so many hospital visitors when a dear friend unexpectedly needed heart surgery. I visited him and his wife in his room on the cardiac floor before my volunteer shift, and I met his sister, who had driven in from out of state for the surgery the next day. Shortly after I started playing in the lobby, my friend’s sister came down from her brother's room and curled up on the love seat behind the piano bench to listen. At first I couldn’t think what to play to soothe her, but finally I hit upon “A Sunday Kind of Love”—a lovely ballad that I can usually play without a hitch.
After I finished, she said, smiling broadly, “I can’t believe you played that song!” She said she loved the Kenny Rankin version, and then she added, referring to her brother’s upcoming surgery, “Now I have a good feeling.”
That conversation took place in July of 2014, and I am happy to say that my friend sailed through his heart surgery and now is doing fine. As for me, somehow the larksome idea I had nearly four years ago has turned into a steady gig, and a few weeks ago I marked 500 hours of volunteer service at the piano in the hospital lobby.
Before I started this volunteer work, I had been a journalist and then a public servant and a caregiver for my late mother. All of these roles helped me satisfy my desire—corny as it may sound—to be of service and make a difference in the world and in the lives of others. Much as I love music, it had not occurred to me that sitting at a piano in a hospital lobby and spinning out tunes from yesteryear that I love and revere would have anything like the same effect. But the dozens of encounters I have had with listeners in the past four years have changed my mind.
Just a few weeks ago, I finished playing a tune to find a young African American man with long dreadlocks sitting quietly in the love seat behind the piano, looking at me. I said hello and we began talking, and somehow I had a sixth sense to ask if he was a musician, too. He said yes, he was a guitarist; as we continued talking, he said he was from Baltimore and he was visiting a relative in the hospital.
And soon he was showing me a video on his iPhone of his truly virtuoso electric guitar work. Then we started talking about the Star Wars movies, which he loves, and the composer John Williams; I mentioned Williams’s haunting theme from the Holocaust film “Schindler’s List,” and the young man called that up on his phone, too. As we stood side by side in the lobby listening to Itzhak Perlman’s gorgeous violin interpretation of that heartbreaking theme, I felt that I had just made a new friend, and I reminded myself that this connection between two people who very likely would never have met otherwise was all because of music and that wild idea I had in the summer of 2012.
If I still need to be persuaded of the tangible benefits of volunteering as a music therapy aide, I can refer to an email I received from a former emergency room employee who, before returning to college last summer, stopped to tell me how much he had enjoyed hearing me play while he worked in the hospital. He plays piano, too, and he was studying to be a doctor; after our conversation, I emailed him links to an essay about music and medicine that I thought he might enjoy reading. He emailed me back a thank you that concluded with these words:
“I hope all is well with you and that the music you provide impacts others the way it impacted me whenever I was fortunate enough to pass by while you were playing.”
I was proud to be a journalist because I thought the stories I researched and wrote might make a difference in the lives of my readers. Also, I liked being able to hold my magazine or newspaper stories in my hands and say, “I wrote this.”
Live music is completely different; it lingers in the air for a second or two and then it vanishes. But the many listeners I have met and talked to in my 500 hours at the hospital piano have convinced me that something of the music I played has remained, if only in the form of a soothing memory in their hearts.
Copyright © 2016 By Susan Hooper
Piano and Music Book Photograph and Yamaha Logo and Piano Keys Photograph Copyright © 2016 By Susan Hooper
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