Baltimore-based musician, arts educator, and administrator Megan Livingston was intuitively interested in The Power of Music in Healthcare: Creative Considerations for Music Professionals, a weeklong workshop first offered at Peabody in June. Though she no longer actively pursues a recording artist career, Livingston knew she wasn’t through with music. She picked up a weekly Sunday gig singing at a church, “just reminding myself of what it means to have a voice that you want to share,” she says. “There’s so many ways to explore what art does for us in our lives and how we can share that with other people, which is something I’ve been wrestling with.”
Prior to joining the 12 other artists and administrators in the summer-intensive’s inaugural cohort, however, Livingston experienced firsthand what art can mean to somebody in a difficult moment: her scheduled noninvasive outpatient procedure was upgraded to open surgery to address a chronic health condition. “We all have one fragile human body, hopefully for some time, and it needs attention and care,” Livingston says. “That care is not always just about the medicine and the machines. There’s other things going on there, and this[workshop] is a place where you can really explore that.”
In the February 11, 2025, New York Times article “For the Sick and Dying, Live Music to Ease the Pain,” Peabody’s professional bedside artists and music-as-care programs were profiled as an example of a growing nationwide trend of bringing the arts into health care settings. How artists find their way into this work, however, has yet to be organized into any kind of standardized training program. Sarah Hoover, Peabody’s associate dean for innovation in the arts and health, researched the skills and training artists need to navigate health care environments in her 2021 book, Music as Care: Artistry in the Hospital Environment, and realized that neither performing arts nor medicine and public health disciplines offer professional development coursework or training specific to artists and administrators interested in this burgeoning practice.
The Power of Music in Healthcare course was created to combine Music as Care’s evidence-based expertise with practical training in workshops, observations, and mentoring sessions in Johns Hopkins Hospital settings. “This work involves a mindset shift, a desire to tap into musical and communicative skills for other purposes than high art,” Hoover says, addingthat she and Lara Bruckmann, Peabody’s Arts in Health program manager, also included a creative reflection as part of the workshop. “Ultimately, we hope that this [course] is not only career-enhancing butactually artistically inspiring.”
Livingston can attest to that motivating spark. The workshops and classes led by Hoover, Bruckmann, and doctoral student Lindsey Choung combined with observing Peabody Faculty Artists in Healthcare Sean Brennan, Nicole Okundaye, and Tamara Wellons provided Livingston and her cohort a front-row seat to music-as-care in action. “There’s no better place to see that art and music, in particular, impacts the human body than in a hospital,” Livingston says.
She mentions that when dealing with problematic and/or stressful relationships and situations at work in the past, she has a tune she sings in her head as a method of providing internal fortitude, a musical snippet from a previous performance-art piece. She also sang it to herself in the pre-op room prior to having surgery.
“I’m actually curious about what pre-surgery Megan would have thought about music and health care,” she says, adding that mantra-making informed her workshop capstone, bringing into sharp focus ideas about the power of art that she had suspectedbut never studied so discretely.
“The practice of being an artist invites you to understand yourself very deeply, which can give you the gift of helping others understand themselves more deeply,” she says. After the workshop, “I not only have such a better understanding of this field and how it is growing, but it’s inspiring to know that I, as an artist, can be part of the care process in ways that I didn’t really know.”