Music therapist Howard Sherman demonstrates a Q-chord digital guitar
with students (l-r) Barbara Kennedy, Jill Gray, Cathy McCormick and Karen Martin.
Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
By Lona O'Connor
A curious shopper follows Howard Sherman into a meeting room at the Greenlands health and wellness store in Delray Beach.
Sherman is an irresistible Pied Piper, hauling bags of percussion instruments — portable drums and other objects that shake, rattle and roar.
He is a music therapist. He has worked with children with autism, elders with Alzheimer’s, people with cancer or head trauma and victims of abuse.
He recently moved to Delray Beach from Boston, where he worked for 38 years. Now semiretired, he takes some clients and is doing demonstrations to explain music therapy.
Although it is often pleasant to listen to music, music therapy means doing music, to whatever degree a person is capable.
Sherman has worked with patients with profound physical disabilities and has always been able to find some way for them to participate. It might mean singing, shaking a tambourine or just feeling the vibrations while someone else plays.
A licensed mental health counselor, Sherman has found that talk therapy and music therapy often complement each other. Music therapists, like other therapists, see patients who are referred to them by medical professionals.
Sherman points out that music and other sound can lower blood pressure, increase the amount of oxygen in the blood, relieve anxiety, improve appetite, stimulate endorphins, aid sleep and reduce the need for antidepressants and some other medications.
At the Greenlands demonstration, five people show up. Sherman starts off singing to his audience but soon hands out small black plastic eggs filled with sand that make a soft shushing noise when shaken.
Suddenly strangers are smiling and swaying and shaking their eggs in time to the song. Health and wellness was never this much fun.
Music therapy developed in the 1950s and now can be pursued at various graduate levels, like other modes of therapy. These days, neurologists using functional MRI technology can see areas of the brain light up when test subjects play music.
Sherman shows a video of patients he has treated. In the video, filmed in the 1970s, a man sits in a chair and stares out the window. Sherman approaches, handing him a drum. With Sherman on the guitar and the man hitting the drum, they do a spirited rendition of Hava Nagila.
Even after the song has ended, the camera shows the man still waving his arms like a conductor.
“He was lifeless and regressed before,” says Sherman. “Look at his arms.”
After a session ends, the patient may not remember what he did but is likely to continue to feel good for an hour or two afterward, Sherman says.
Rhythm, a component of music, also shows powerful effects. In his video, Sherman asks an Alzheimer’s patient where she is. She is unable to tell him. Her eyes are blank. Then he coaxes her to recite a poem. She launches into several stanzas of a poem she memorized decades ago. When she is done, her eyes are bright and focused.
“Where are we?” he asks again. And she tells him, immediately.
A common problem in frail elderly people or people with long-term medical conditions is learned helplessness, or losing the desire to act for oneself.
“The TV is their best friend; people feed them and make their bed,” says Sherman.
He worked with a woman who had long ago taken to her bed and refused to get out. In a video of her treatment session, Sherman first asks her to take a short walk down the hall with him but she firmly says no. Then they sing When Irish Eyes Are Smiling together.
“I sat on her bed, I was invading her space, but she’s looking at me and smiling,” says Sherman.
He asks her again to take a walk, and this time she practically bounces out of bed.
Music gets by defenses
“Music can help motivate the withdrawn,” says Sherman. “She said she didn’t feel like getting out of bed, but playing or singing stimulates physical activity and social interaction. And there is improved self-confidence when you learn an instrument.”
Musical activity can also help people express emotions without using words.
“There was this fellow dealing with depression and anxiety, but he would say, ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ I helped him write a song about the issues in his life and he was able to break that negativity and resistance. He had a history of alcoholism, apathy, depression and weight gain,” Sherman says.
“When I would get into personal issues, he would block the process. I asked him if he would write a song for me and he became expressive and creative. Music therapy allows for the defenses to retreat and help a person gain control of the issues.”
When Sherman was brought to the bedside of a head trauma victim, who was not apparently responsive, he played his guitar sitting close to her on her bed.
“She could feel the rhythm on her shoulder,” he said.
In Sherman’s video, he visits a woman in the later stages of Alzheimer’s. Even though she seems almost comatose, he eases her fingers across the strings of an autoharp while he sings Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral (That’s an Irish Lullaby).
At the Greenlands store, Sherman ends his demonstration with a song and the group sings the chorus, “Let it roll off your back.”
Barbara Kennedy was the first in the Greenlands group to take a chance on participation. She perked up when Sherman brought out his musical instruments. She laughed when he told her the black eggs were called Chicken Shakes.
“I just love that sound,” she says. “And I love that name.
“When I was a little girl, we used to watch Mitch Miller on television and we would sing along, me and my mother and my siblings,” Kennedy says.
But she’s also the first to leave. She apologizes that she has to rush off to Boca Raton for another form of music therapy. She’s going ballroom dancing.
To reach Howard Sherman, call 781-799-0871 or violinhw@comcast.net. He offers a sliding scale for sessions dependent on what the client can afford.
Lona O’Connor has a lifelong interest in health and healthy living. Send column ideas to Lona13@bellsouth.net.
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