Sounds to Soothe:
Harpists find way to touch others with their music
by John Lucas and Marilou Berry
Heads turn when Mary Sublett maneuvers through the halls of Regional Medical Center in Madisonville, Ky. After all, it’s not every day one sees a concert-sized harp being towed through a hospital corridor. Yet that’s what she has been doing three days a week since early June — pulling her 6-foot tall, 75-pond harp through the halls and wards of the hospital, playing and singing for patients, their families and hospital staff.
Cyndi Bickel used a golf cart to roll her harp to Regina Continuing Care Center where she asked Sister Mary Rogers if she could play for the residents confined to their beds . “Sister’s eyes lit up, and I knew I was on my way,” Bickel said.
Both Sublett in Madisonville and Bickel in Evansville are part of a national program to bring healing through music. Bickel learned of the International Harp Therapy Program, based at the San Diego (Calif.) Hospice through the Internet. The program’s goal is to have a harpist in every hospital by 2020.
Bickel talked with Rogers about the program and within two weeks the Daughters of Charity provided her with a grant to begin training in the International Harp Therapy Program. In return, Bickel is playing once a week for a year and a half at Regina and at Seton Manor, an infirmary. In addition, she works 20 hours a week as a St. Mary’s Medical Center employee in its holistic care department. Both women, who have been trained by Henderson, Ky., harpist Louise Benton, feel called to share their music.
Sublett, who resigned a position as a special education teacher at Hopkins County’s Pride Elementary School to play in the hospital, says she knew it was what she wanted to do after watching a television program late last year about a woman who played for the ill. Sublett, an Owensboro, Ky., native whose parents gave her the 1903 model Lyon & Healy harp as a college graduation present (she chose it instead of a Cadillac convertible), contacted the hospital about playing for patients there.
For Jacqueline McCracken, an oncology unit director in the hospital’s Mahr Cancer Center, Sublett’s inquiry was the answer to a prayer. “Music has so many, many, many proven benefits,” she said. “It does relax you. It does bring down your blood pressure. It allows people some peace within themselves. The vibrations of a harp or a stringed instrument — and particularly the harp because it’s such a large area — are soothing and peaceful.”
Sublett learned that her first day on her new job. When she asked a male patient if she could play for him, his response, she said, was that he didn’t care
he just wanted to get out of there. He added he hadn’t been able to sleep during the three days he had been in the hospital. “I said, ‘We’ll see what we can do,’” she said. “So I played Green Sleeves. I played two lines of music, and I heard snoring.” The patient was so converted he asked that his daughter learn to play.
Bickel believes that “music is to be shared” and after teaching piano for 30 years, she wanted to do more. She bought her first Celtic harp, a 34-string Triplett. “I was consumed by the idea of learning to play it and sharing the peace it had brought to my life with others.” She had been was playing the harp the day one of her favorite patients, Pauline Fehn, died. “I knew she was gone,” Bickel said. “I knew she was just moving from this world to the next. And I also knew that I should keep playing. I played for maybe 15 minutes after she died, and I realize now that those minutes were just as important as the 45 I had played as she was taking her last breaths.” Fehn’s husband, Remig, said Bickel’s music made his wife’s death a beautiful experience that the family would never forget.
And there was the 50-year-old woman who knew that death was near and whose son was a youth minister. For them Bickel played a song she wrote and recorded titled “I’ll Never Leave You,” written, she said, after asking God what she could leave in a hospital room that was “more of Him and less of me.” She told the dying woman she wished she could heal her, to which the woman responded, “Oh, you have healed me here,” as she touched her heart.
But there are patients who don’t welcome Bickel’s musical sounds. The relative of a very ill woman said, “No, we don’t want to confuse her” (giving her the idea she had already died).
And a man jokingly told her, “No, I’m not ready (to go to heaven) yet.”
Sublett’s interest in the harp springs from a childhood encounter with Harpo Marx. Following a performance by him at the Owensboro Sportscenter, she was taken backstage to meet him. “I was just so entranced with his harp,” she said. “Here I was just a little, bitty thing looking up at this big harp. I told him I really wanted to play that, and he sat me on his lap and said, ‘I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t.’”
Sublett’s work at the hospital is funded by the Trover Foundation, owner of RMC, from donations given to the cancer center. The foundation has provided a down payment on a new Celtic harp, which is smaller and easier to transport.
But with only 31 strings, compared to the 47 on her concert-size instrument, and a different system of noting, Sublett says she has to learn a “whole new
way of playing.”
McCracken said she is hopeful the program can be supported through donations. A non-profit corporation, The Healing Harp, is being organized to
receive contributions for the program. Eventually, she hopes other harpists can be added. “I just cannot get to all the people that want and need this program,” Sublett said.
Sublett’s playing has taken her to those both at the end and beginning of her lives. She recounts that one man, only a few minutes from death, roused as she was playing for him to ask she play “Going Home.”
In another instance, Sublett says, “I wasn’t in the delivery room, but I was right at the door, and the first thing the baby heard was his momma’s voice and
Brahman’s Lullaby on the harp.”
Music without words means leaving behind the mind. And leaving behind the mind is meditation.
Meditation returns you to the source. And the source of all is sound. — Kabir
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