Samantha Chao
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Todd Frazier, Director of the Center for Performing Arts Medicine, Houston Methodist Hospital, Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

The concept of understanding music as language has been around for centuries, but only until recent decades has this language of music been utilized for medical purposes by people such as Todd Frazier, director of the Center for Performing Arts Medicine (CPAM) at Houston Methodist Hospital. My own passions for medicine and music have also drawn me toward the field of medical humanities and arts medicine, and it was an honor to hear his discussion with Longitude.site contributor Anu Dwarumpudi, a biochemistry and molecular biology graduate from Rice University, about how he is working to professionalize the integration of music and other performing arts into the medical sphere with the intention of improving the overall experience of being a patient.

Professionally trained as a composer and musician at Juilliard School in New York City, Todd has long been familiar with the skills and benefits that music provides to those who practice or engage with it. Even as a student, he recognized the broad-ranging utility of these skills and wanted to share his knowledge to budding young musicians through a career in music education. It was not until he started watching his colleagues work with special needs children, however, that he quickly realized the benefits of music on neurological development and regeneration. This sparked his interest in the world of arts integration, the interdisciplinary field that integrates the arts into the healthcare community for therapeutic, educational, and expressive purposes.

I am always impressed whenever I hear stories about how people manage to move between and combine conventionally disparate fields, but Todd’s journey is particularly interesting to me because of how its intersectionality necessitates diverse teams who, together, can make a greater impact than any one discipline alone. Through such collaborations that Todd fosters at Methodist, the hospital has daily musical performances to reduce anxiety and modulate mood. They also have multidisciplinary care teams consisting of music therapists, neurologists, and artists who work with patients on anything from inpatient rehabilitation to psychiatric therapy.

Currently, Todd is working on a research project that monitors the distribution of oxygenated blood flow in the brain as patients listen to music. This information can be used to create customized listening lists that help to exercise the brain for better rehabilitation outcomes for stroke patients. His discussion about how patients respond positively to soothing music resonates with my own experiences serving as a music volunteer at Methodist, and it is very exciting to see the development of new technologies that allow for widespread distribution of such individualized care to patients.

I am very inspired to hear about how Todd has managed to combine both the medical and art worlds to create a dedicated space at Methodist to serve current patients and to research future music therapy options. The rising importance of art in medicine through programs such as CPAM has created many opportunities for growth and development in the intersection between conventionally disparate fields, which makes studying medical humanities in the classroom all the more rewarding and stimulating.

Highlights from the interview:

Everyone’s family, community, and life circumstances tend to create an initial role for them in society. What was expected of you growing up and throughout your career, and how did you adhere to or stray from that?

I grew up wanting to be involved with music. I’m a composer of music, and I think from 7th or 8th grade I was really drawn toward being in the world of music, but at the same time I wasn’t really sure what I would do professionally with it. I just knew it was something I was drawn to. I decided that I’d go to music school, so I went for composition because I was drawn to creating—or using music to illuminate ideas that I thought could communicate. It was just a language that I was passionate about.

My parents never really had any preconceived idea of who I would become or not become. I think they were just, in general, supportive of something that I might be interested in and passionate about. They would always encourage me to do my best, and I always tried to because I thought it was so great that they were being supportive of something like a music composition career, which I knew that they were concerned would have limited career opportunities.

I went to undergraduate school for music, and then I went to graduate school for music at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York and then the Juilliard School in New York City. It really wasn’t until I started my last year in graduate school [that I started] thinking about both what I was going to do career-wise when I graduated, but also the question of why there weren’t more opportunities, professional opportunities, for artists…limiting artists in the way we describe professional success. Meaning when you go through a traditional music school or conservatory, there’s a traditional trajectory of what would be considered professional success—say, you’re in instrumental music, violin player—and it would be joining a professional orchestra or having a solo career or also, maybe, teaching. Teaching is the common denominator amongst all of them. I always said if everyone just became a teacher, we would just be teaching the next generation of artists to continue to go into a field where there are very limited career opportunities.

I really remember thinking to myself that I can really be excited about how I might broaden the definition of professional success for artists, which for me would be stretching it well beyond what would be more of a traditional career path. Looking at what do artists do uniquely—are they creative? Do they look at problems in a unique way, and do they find solutions in unique ways? Do they work with teams in unique ways? Are they sensitive to differences?

So that set me out on a path where I first was in education, music education, and really trying to make sure I could do things to safeguard that opportunity for young people to just have music as part of their general education. Not having anything to do with training professional musicians, but just the idea of can we elevate the importance of art and music to an integral part of a well-rounded education? Then I started to look at how the arts were being used in schools, and they were being used [in] more than just your music class and your choir class. There were a lot of teachers that used the arts and creativity in teaching subjects. We call it sometimes arts integrated learning or experiential learning. And [I started to look at] how teachers were developing new applications to work in special needs education, where students may have learning challenges or developmental difficulties, and thinking that the medical center knows a lot about neurological challenges or different neurologic development phases. And I said, well, why don’t we start to bring some of the folks in the medical center [to work] more closely in collaboration with what’s happening in education and the arts in schools and look at how there could be synergies amongst these things that could improve. I knew there was a young field called music therapy that was being utilized in the hospital clinically with patients, so I started bringing music therapists over to schools, working with classroom teachers and looking at folks that were specialists in childhood development.

That was my first experience in thinking maybe we could have a much, much broader circle in which the arts could be a common denominator that would take us from education to what was happening in communities, community health, and what’s happening in hospitals and public health.

I started to do some research experiments on how the arts could uniquely be used to develop attention span and develop things that wouldn’t be considered musical skills, but of course they are. If anyone plays an instrument, they know it needs some focused attention, but things that any teacher in any classroom is trying to do is to help their children develop their attention span. The arts, if they’re presented in a well-thought-out way, can be a fantastic tool to do that. That got me really involved in this world that we’re calling arts in health, and even though it’s been around forever, it’s still really professionally emerging.

I’m thrilled that the Methodist Hospital here in Houston—at around that same time when I was reaching out to the hospital and looking at what’s happening in the arts community, in education, and how we might learn better from each other—they were wanting to have a stronger relationship with the arts community in Houston. They saw that I was already building these bridges, and they asked me to come here to think about different ways that the arts could have entry points in the traditional hospital environment and might also provide some solution to some of today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. That’s where I am now, running this center here at the Center for Performing Arts Medicine, which has arts integration. We have live music every day to improve the overall experience, to reduce anxiety, to rejuvenate. We have music therapy, so that music therapists who are now trained (it’s a healthcare board certified degree) work with patients in clinical teams, anywhere from inpatient rehabilitation to psychiatric clinic, using some of the unique stimulating elements of rhythm and melody for neurologic rehabilitation, like in gait training and balance and melody with speech therapy. All the way to the psychiatric clinic, [they are using] the motivational elements of music to help alter mood, to help modulate mood. And then we have a research division which is using some modern tools like the fMRI, which is just a brain scan, to learn more about why the arts have this unique response in humans and how we can maybe better harness that to help therapeutically. And then we have a clinic that helps take care of injuries related to artists, just as sports medicine has for athletes.

When did you envision yourself doing the work that you’re doing now?

Early on, I really had much more of a focus on trying to safeguard the arts’ role in education, feeling like if we can’t even provide some basic level of exposure to the arts for our children, then it’s going to be hard to build on that or evolve the importance of that in communities when people are grown up.

So it really wasn’t so much about training, or wanting to train, or have more people become professional artists. It was more about the arts and how the arts could be a really integral balance in somebody’s development in education. In the K-12 school system, especially in the public system, you come up against the standardized tests. Most of the time, people might think a lot of the things the arts are doing makes sense, and they see it works, but because they weren’t actually tested in the standardized tests that evaluate and rank schools, there weren’t any specific questions about the arts. A lot of the principals and decision makers wouldn’t put resources towards those; they’d put all their resources toward what was on the test. That’s where the phrase “teaching to the test” came from.

I’ve always been someone who never just accepted what was status quo. I asked the question, why do we have to have that standard test as the parameter for everything that’s important for our kids to know, when we know that there are things that aren’t on it that are important? So I started to look for other ways. I explored other ways to evaluate the role of the arts in our lives and [what] ways would be dynamic, in presenting a strong case. That’s when I started to look towards not so much at K-12 test assessments, but how learning these things in history and math and science is a neurological developmental process and this is the type of thing that the medical field really knows a lot about. They can tell you what looks like a good activity for your brain when the different hubs are connecting to each other, and when your brain is not stimulated. They also know that neurological activity is important during brain development.

That’s when I first started to wonder if there’s some different tests or a different approach we can look at that compares the arts to other types of situations or activities that might show some unique benefits it might have. That’s when I got really excited about some of the modern tools we have. For example, we have the fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging. It’s just a magnet. But when you’re in the magnet, it can show electrical connectivity in the brain, sort of a roadmap of how the brain is working. It can also show different chemical releases. It can also show where the oxygenated blood is going to, which tells you what part of the brain is being used. Neurologists can look at these scans and tell you what a robust healthy oxygen flow looks like, or a normal positive connectivity pattern looks like. They can also tell you that these are developing; that these connectivity patterns grow over time through stimulation, and they call that plasticity. They can tell you—for example, if you look at a brain of an autistic child, there will still be a lot of hubs, points of activity, but there won’t be as much connectivity between the different hubs. Which might make sense because some of these children are having trouble developmentally connecting different parts to their emotions, to their actions, different things. So I thought this could be—this was a whole new way of giving some strengths to the arts as a medium that should not be discounted within education, especially at critical times when children are developing.

I started to do some research that didn’t look at standardized tests. Things like focused attention and comparing it against other teaching styles. Reading with a textbook, different things. And we got some really compelling brain scan activity, which showed some very intricate kind of connectivity and stimulation. That started to gain some new kinds of attention from some of the principals and people at school, especially for schools that have special needs divisions, because it just happened that those were areas where I found a lot of schools were struggling with and they were really looking for more ways to try to help those children in their development. That probably happened for me about eight years ago, and I made that switch, this switch from the education world being my playing field to actually within a health community or a hospital being the playing field. That might be the direction of least resistance that had the most opportunity. Plus, you didn’t have standardized tests, and you didn’t have some of these other potential boundaries; you really just needed to show some basic fundamentals and people seemed pretty open and accepting to see this as a viable tool.

Did you have someone who acted as a mentor who helped cultivate your interests and guide you along?

When I was in high school, learning more and more about my connection to music, I definitely had some music teachers who were mentors and inspiration to me. And then in music schools, there were people that definitely inspired me. In this particular field, I was looking for people involved with it. There wasn’t anything going on like there is now. Now, at the Texas Medical Center, most of the hospitals have some arts and medicine program. At the time I was inspired by the opportunity. I definitely sought out people. For example, I’m not a music therapist, so I sought out music therapists to better understand what they were doing, how they were doing it. I did realize that just as an artist, performing artist, there really wasn’t a lot of specific education going into how you would prepare a program, what kind of pieces you might prepare if you were going to perform for an audience in a hospital. I guess because I was already in the music world, being a composer and knowing something about music, I got excited about that. That’s the first thing I did here at Methodist. I proposed that we be the first hospital here to create a really coordinated professional entry point or doorway for the arts community, arts and culture community, to be able to share these unique audiences.

I really had thought a lot about how thinking for preparing music for these audiences needed to be different, and we needed to create some new guidelines to orient artists, and that would contribute to the further professionalization of this as a field as well. So, for example, a group played here today, and we talked about the idea that no one that’s actually here in the community areas came and bought a ticket to hear them play. They’re here because they were going to be there anyway. Music is giving a space and an opportunity to share, and the hope is that it can support, enrich, and enhance their journey of either caregiving for a family member or friend, or employees, if they’re visiting. Anyone and everyone here, we talk about using music to lower anxiety, and everyone probably has a little anxiety about what they’re going to do, who they’re going to see, what they’re waiting for. And also provide that real distraction and turning that into a positive, rejuvenating experience. Maybe the arts can help them take a step back and look at their lives in a different way, or a fresh way, and renew strength.

We do now have a very robust—about 150 performances here a year in our different lobbies, in addition to pianists. We have five staff pianists that play every day in our lobbies, seven days a week. And so the combination of all that is music has a very visible role in just the basic environment here. The founder of this center is a doctor named Richard Stasney; he’s an ENT physician and he takes care of singers. I suppose I could say he was one of my mentors within this field. He really encouraged me because he knew he wanted someone to connect the hospital to the arts, and he actually reached out to me and asked if I would come in and work here and see how that could be done.

Wow, that’s very interesting. I didn’t realize your staff was that extensive.

Well, we started with just one employee just six years ago, and now we have about 21.

What do you think are the misconceptions people have about your job and your field?

I think there is still a feeling that the arts are something special that can be included if you either just have a little extra money or you have some volunteers. Or as entertainment.

I don’t want to discount that the arts certainly can entertain, but I think that there’s been enough information and research that shows that the arts in these environments, in these very vulnerable environments, can also be a very productive tool to alter the mood, and to motivate, and to build resilience. I think that people are surprised at how professionally it’s evolved to a point where, not all hospitals, but at this hospital, it’s something that they justify putting money behind and supporting. People justify making contributions and giving grants to have this as part of the experience, and I think that’s something that takes a little bit of a shift in some people’s minds to recognize that it’s evolved.

What skills do you find yourself utilizing the most in your position, and how do you think your college years informed that?

Of course in music conservatory, we learned a lot about music history and theory and the craft. I guess I use that because we review the different artists who want to come share music here. We review the programming. We’re tasked to look at things that will connect to our community, so we look at where our employees and patients come from. Interestingly enough, employees will be a mix of from the US but also some from India and there’s also a good number from different Asian countries. How do we use the arts to make people feel at home and welcome and celebrate different times of year? Just having a good, broad education in music history has helped that, but as far as administratively running the center here, I have to say I did a lot of that learning on the job. I’m happy to say that I try to always learn from my mistakes. I mean I think I’ve always been well-intentioned. One of the things I’ve learned is to try not to move something through too soon or too fast, you know, the importance of really thoroughly and prudently taking one step at a time and how that increases your chance of success and long-term success. Some of these efforts across America, in arts and health, you’ll find someone gives you a grant, or all of a sudden, they’ll have some extra budget money, and they’ll have some projects, and they’ll hire some people and do some things. And then all of a sudden, you hear the center is closing, or they lost their grant, or the administration changed and they had to let people go. I’ve really tried to not ever be in a situation where we haven’t either developed or established something to a point to where I think it would be considered critical or so important that I would hope that it wouldn’t be something that would be easily thrown out.

One of the skills in working in any kind of arts or any kind of nonprofit, including hospital administration, especially if you’re working at a nonprofit hospital, is fundraising. In general, good financial planning, budgeting strategy, and also, in my case, fundraising, which is usually working with individuals who might make contributions—your private foundations and also public funds that might be used. I learned pretty early on, even when I was working more in the education world, that if you can learn how to do this and you can be successful, it gives you a lot of strength as far as being able to safeguard your programs, sustain your programs. Also build a reputation of stability, if it could be something that can be continued year after year. Interestingly enough in our case here, the better we have done with fundraising, I think the more attention we’ve been receiving, and ultimately sometimes the more operational hospital support [we] would get, which would be funds from the hospital supporting us as well. So, coming up with a nice balance of operational funds, earned income funds, supporting what we do, as well as philanthropic funds. I’m trying to keep a healthy balance with those, too, so we can safeguard our activities.

Is there a particular project that is your favorite? Or that you think was the most impactful on the position you’re in now?

Well, professionally, I’m excited that we did raise a large sum of money. We raised a little over a million dollars that we’ve put in an endowment account, a restricted endowment account, where we’re just using the interest. That’s dedicated to what we call arts integration. It’s how we can work with the arts and culture community so they can contribute to the experience here in the hospital. I’m excited about that, because in raising that endowment, it means that that program will have a permanent funding source in perpetuity so that this hospital will always be known as having that available to them. As an artist myself, and as an administrator, I’m proud that there is something that will have a life of its own.

The project that I have the most interest in, excitement, and hope for—we’re right in the middle. We’re about halfway through a research project, which is based on some of our publications using the fMRI looking at individuals’ relationships to music and how we can take some individual preferences, and we’ve been very consistent in being able to create these customized listening lists, which are based both on music that someone has a strong positive emotional connection to but also based on music that is completely unfamiliar to that person. Using those in a unique mix to create what we see as a healthy distribution of oxygenated blood flow throughout different parts of the brain, the emotion and memory and the focused attention areas. And so what we’re doing in our stroke center now, patients who are volunteering, they’re doing these individualized lists three times a day for 90 days, and about 15 minutes each time. And the idea is that it’s an exercise for the brain. It’s a good example of what we call music medicine. In a way it’s almost like taking a pill, but instead of taking a pill, you’re listening to the music. We know that the music also has some chemical releases and changes certain blood flow patterns and connectivity patterns, so there is some neurologic change happening, and the thought is that this consistent profusion of blood, [this] exercise may help during that rehabilitation process. The different areas of the brain that might be compromised, [this] might help them recover. At some point, there are parts of the brain after a stroke that won’t recover, but there does seem to be some question as to how much and which parts of those might be, so giving it as much oxygen as you can might be an aid in recovery. Early signs and some other studies show that it does seem to make some difference. But this is a very thorough study; they have an fMRI scanner at the beginning, the middle, and the end, and they also have different neuropsychological and motor exams at the beginning and the end. So when we finish, all of our patients will have a very high quality clinical study, which will give us some evidence [as] to whether this type of intervention has value or not. Of course, I have high hopes that it might, but either way, it will be important. It will add important information to the field, and we will learn from it.

Earlier I was saying I was trying to find new ways to show value in what the arts can do, and so the neurologist in the stroke center, how I approached him was that I showed these fMRI scans. They can see for themselves what was happening, and they thought that that looked like a very healthy pattern. So that was a successful way of finding a new language that has value. Otherwise, I would have just said, I have this idea. People like music. If you play this music for people, it might help them recover better, and just based on that, it made them happy or something like that. And I suspect that wouldn’t have been enough to have them create a formal clinical study. The idea of thinking creatively about how to communicate value, that’s also a good example of that. I really have high hopes for it.

This fMRI technology has only been around for 10 or 15 years, which, relatively speaking, is not that long. That’s been a new way to look into the brain to understand what’s happening, but let’s say that this stroke study does work and these individualized listening lists do seem to be a tool that someone can use for themselves as a healthy listening technique that could help them have even better results. Technology could then help us create an app that could be something that could be shared around the world. That would be embedded with all the decisions and the database of unfamiliar pieces and music history, all the information that we’ve garnered from this work. And immediately, through technology, you’d potentially be helping people all around the world. Of course, that’s thinking a little ahead.

We’ve talked about how you’ve collaborated with neurologists and musical therapists. How does working on a project with a team full of diverse people work in terms of structure or organization?

One of the things I try to do all the time is put together diverse teams and teams of people that aren’t all within the same discipline. I guess it’s natural because I’m already an artist in the medical community. For me, if we’re looking at music medicine or music therapy application, I think, well, let’s get the imaging person involved, so probably a physicist in the imaging department. Let’s get a neurologist who knows about brain development, let’s get an artist who can really be an expert, a musicology expert, a music history expert—you know, and let’s get, of course, the music therapist themselves.

I think part of the nature of what we do is look at bridges and common denominators amongst different disciplines, so the arts also are something that reaches almost every aspect of the hospital. The arts at Methodist have a supportive collaboration here with our spiritual care chaplains. They also have a connection to neurosurgeons in helping detect brain stimulation in ways that music can only do, and sort of everything in between. So music lends itself well to bringing people of a variety of disciplines together, and you naturally get people from different cultures and different backgrounds, especially being at a place like the Texas Medical Center that has such a large international presence. We have been congratulated at conferences, at neurologic conferences and things—and I’d have to say we were excited that we didn’t even think of it—but we were congratulated on how diverse our teams were. I guess [when] you look at some research coming out of a university, or out of only a neurologic institute, you might just have all those kinds of people, and so that is something I realized: when you interject the arts, it also seems like a nice way to open up the stage for a lot more diversity. We just do it because it makes sense naturally. We don’t have any kind of mandate to do it, but it has been very helpful.

How do you think that science and technology will impact your specific area of interest?

Telemedicine is a big deal because for us; that’s one of the disconnects with medicine. When you have a patient in a very controlled environment, you can get a lot done because you are controlling all the different variables. But of course, when they’re discharged, you don’t see them again. You lose track of them. The telemedicine has allowed us to maintain that supportive connection to that person, so if they’re having trouble reintegrating to their community, they have that lifeline. And also for us, for the patients in the psychiatric clinic, we’re able to ask them are they using their listening lists, have they been helpful. Before, we wouldn’t even know at all. We thought they could just lose their listening devices, or they didn’t know how to recharge them, or they just threw them away or something. Luckily, so far they have all said that they are still using their lists, and it’s been a very helpful thing.

Is there a methodology that you have in terms of figuring out what music to give to a specific individual? Is there a way that you personalize it? How do you do that?

We’ve developed with our music therapy department what’s called a music biography, a music history. Because at the same time, you want to make sure that you don’t choose a negative piece—just as music can bring about positive memories, sometimes it can also be associated with a negative event—so you want to safeguard your choices against those types of choices that might be counter to what you’re trying to do. So the music history will have something about their preferred genres, how often they listen to music, even writing down specific songs or pieces that would be their favorite. We ask a lot of questions, such as are they religious, have they served in the military, are they married, a lot of different things. Let’s say if they were in the military, there may be certain pieces that would be inspiring to them, but it also may be a sensitive area. There may be certain pieces around a period of time that may have a negative trigger for them. If we created an app out of the stroke study, they would go down and answer all these questions in the app before they actually set up their music listening. We would call that music therapy informed so that music therapists, their experiences as therapists themselves, will help.

We focused a lot on music and its impact on medicine. What is your opinion on using other forms of art like painting, dance, so on and so forth, in terms of health and healing?

I think there’s room for all of it. We happen to have 10 music therapists here, but each one of the art forms have their own therapy degree—visual arts, movement and dance, poetry and creative writing. I think as far as the discipline, music therapy seems to have maybe…a little bit more research behind it. It’s had a little bit more time in the field and has evolved to a pretty comprehensive point. It may or may not be 100 percent true on that, but the other thing [is] here in Texas, we have a good number of universities that offer a music therapy degree, so we have a lot more music therapists wanting to work and wanting to shadow, wanting to do an internship. We have very few, if any, universities that offer visual art therapy or dance therapy. It changes in the region. I understand there’s a lot more visual art therapists up in the northeast, and it probably has something to do with that there’s courses that they cultivate and offer, and there’s more of an awareness, and there’s more research and more pilot programs going in that way. We’re very open to other art forms, and we do have creative writing classes for employees. We have photography classes for employees, and we have visual arts classes for employees. And those are a lot of things we do for employees, using the arts to build resiliency and also a creative outlet to help them think about what they do and help them balance their life between work and home and their hobbies. Those aren’t taught by therapists; they are taught usually by professional artists. And we do a lot of visual art programming exhibits in the hospital and things like that, but as far as specific patient therapy, right now we only have music therapy here. We’re also an adult hospital. Texas Children’s right next door does have a visual art therapist, and there’s some thought that when you’re working with children, creating and making stuff becomes a little bit more natural. But it can also be very effective with adults too, and I’m sure we’ll have a visual art therapist at some point. 

What advice would you give to a student that was interested in getting into your field?

There’s starting to emerge some certificates, some of them online, some degrees that will introduce you to the field. There’s one out of the University of Florida, there’s an online certificate in arts. There are also workshops. There’s a two-day workshop that means you get some certificate or some acknowledgement. I think that anything one can do to gain more information and knowledge from people who are active practitioners is always going to be helpful whether you go into that field or not. We didn’t used to have much of that, but fortunately today there are some opportunities like that, across America, to gain some hands-on experiences.

There’s also each of the therapies, what we call creative arts therapies music, drama, dance, visual art. Each of those has a national organization that has an annual conference, and anyone can go to any of these conferences to just immerse and learn more about it, learn education opportunities. I happen to be president of what’s called the National Organization for Arts in Health, NOAH, and that organization aims to be a broad representation of all the different related fields and professional fields that are working in arts in health. That organization has a national conference, and this year it’s in September in Boston. Folks register and there are scholarships for students and all sorts of things. It will have a very broad introduction to what’s happening in the field across America. So I think, for example, a young person coming out of school, let’s say they apply here for an artist-in-residency. If I see that they’ve done a weekend, hands-on arts in health seminar, they’ve gone to a national conference, they’ve maybe shadowed somebody, that’s going to really make that person stand out. Because right now, there aren’t many full degrees, full undergrad or full master’s, specifically in arts in health. There are a few, but a lot of them will be blended. [They] are sort of those extra certificate kind of credits. Also those things will help a young person confirm if it’s really the field they want to go into or not.

Did anything I ask or didn’t ask spark anything else that you think would be important to mention? 

There’s a report called “Arts, Health, and Well-being in America.” It was published by the National Organization of Arts in Health, NOAH, and it’s a free download from their website. It’s essentially a state of the field in arts in health in America today, and it’s very easy to read. It’s really interesting. It has program models, and it goes over a lot of the different realms in which the arts are used in health, including with veterans, including with the elderly, including all sorts, including clinically in the therapies. If someone…wants to know what would be the next thing to dive into this, I’d say that would definitely be the next thing. It’s a great way to get a really good introduction to what’s happening in the field. It’s not 100 pages; it’s maybe 25 pages. It’s got pictures and lots of links and a glossary. It’s a really great foundation for learning more about the field. And it’s downloadable on that site. The site is thenoah.net.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.