Alumni News & Notes

Karen Wacks, Ed.M.’90: Music Therapy at Its Best

by Lory Hough

Wacks, back left, at Shangilia As a child, Karen Wacks, Ed.M.’90, went to sleep every night listening to her father, a government worker, play the accordion, mostly songs from the ’30s and ’40s. Her mother played the piano and between Wacks and her three brothers, the trumpet, piano, French horn, clarinet, bassoon, and saxophone were covered. Dinnertime often looked like a Broadway musical with the whole family eating, talking, and singing. It wasn’t until years later that she realized this wasn’t typical.

Growing up was, for Wacks, all about feeling good through music. Eventually, and perhaps not surprisingly, she ended up teaching at Berklee College of Music in Boston, which includes notable alumni such as Branford Marsalis, Diana Krall, Quincy Jones, and Bill Frisell. And while her parents and brothers influenced her love of music, it was her grandfather, a singer, who convinced her to focus on music therapy.

“He had Alzheimer’s,” she says. “I didn’t realize it back then, but he’d come sit next to me on the piano bench after dinner. People with Alzheimer’s are usually unfocused and not lucid. Music was a way of bringing him back to the here and now. He’d be himself. He’d laugh and feel an amount of joy that was missing in his life. Music is so powerful in helping.”

This has become even more apparent to Wacks after her recent two-week trip to Kenya with nine of her students to work with children in two orphanages. In conjunction with the nonprofit Musicians for World Harmony, the group shared music with the children, collaborated on music therapy techniques with local musicians, and tried to figure out how their music could have an impact.

The trip was never what Wacks calls a “we’re-hereto- save-you” mission. The Kenyans, she says, already know the importance of music.

“Music is healing, music is health, and music is empowering; this, I have always believed, but now it has even more meaning,” she wrote in the blog created for the trip. “In Kenya, I have seen firsthand how music can elevate the human spirit and is woven into the very fabric of living. No separation between health and music — it is one. No need to write in medical charts, give workshops on the power of music to heal, or do extensive research projects; music as a healing modality is embraced and accepted and part of the culture.”

Music is so ingrained in Kenya, she says, that one of the orphanages, Shangilia in Nairobi, even had a performing arts focus. More than 200 streets kids, mostly abandoned boys who had lost parents to AIDS and HIV, or who were themselves infected, were taught music, dance, and acrobatics. Calling it a “very powerful, powerful place,” Wacks says that she and her Berklee students learned as much from the Kenyan students as the Kenyans learned from them. Within a few minutes of arriving, Wacks was teaching the students how to play trumpets that had previously been donated; within the hour, the two groups had spontaneously written “We Are One,” a song that has since become the theme for the orphanage and the music therapy students. The video is also posted on YouTube.

“This was music therapy at its best, tapping into the music that lives within us all, no matter what our abilities or disabilities, our disease or state of health,” Wacks wrote in the blog. “Already, these children are our teachers.”

Go to the blog at http://musictherapyinafrica.wordpress.com to read more about the trip.

About the Article

A version of this article originally appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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