The healing power of music

The Festival is exploring how live music can help those in hospital, with a series of performances as part of its Education & Community Programmes.

From left, Fatima Al Hashemi, Eman Al Hashimi and Mohammed Al Awadi, participants in Music in Hospitals. Lee Hoagland / The National

When Mohammed Al Awadi picked up his guitar in Al Ain’s Tawam Hospital on Tuesday last week and began playing some of his original compositions, he didn’t exactly feel comfortable.

“It’s a strange place to play music, in a hospital. I didn’t know how the audience would react,” said the 21-year-old Emirati, who is studying chemical engineering at the Higher Colleges of Technology in Abu Dhabi.

He needn’t have worried. As his music drifted down hallways, doctors, hospital staff and families all stopped to listen.

“People seemed moved, but I wanted to reach the patients themselves, to brighten up their days,” he says. “I think the patients are stuck in their rooms, concerned with their own worries, not as interested in what is going on around them.”

Still, he did feel he made an impact. He had chosen calmer compositions to play, and even performed a rendition of Metallica's Nothing Else Matters on his guitar, to gauge the reaction of his audience.

“People just seemed to like the music. It was different, and unexpected,” he says.

Al Awadi is also a pianist, and on Monday he will sit down at a piano in the main lobby of the Sheikh Khalifa Medical Centre in Abu Dhabi. Three other Emirati musicians – Mohammed Al Jahory, Fatma Al Hashemi and Eman Al Hashimi – will join him. All became friends after meeting at The Piano School, run by the Ministry of Culture, Youth & Community Development.

The four musicians will each take a turn at the piano as part of the Music in Hospitals initiative. The event is returning for its fifth year, presented by Abu Dhabi Festival’s Education and Community Programmes. It also included a guitar performance by Al Awadi yesterday morning at the Imperial College London Diabetes Centre. The initiative aims to highlight the health-care benefits of live music, which is believed to aid patient recovery and lessen the trauma of hospital stays.

Al Hashemi, a 28-year-old pianist who began studying the instrument six years ago, works as an assistant teacher of piano at The Piano Centre part time while studying to become an architectural engineer.

“This is going to be a completely new experience, different from the other performances and recitals I’ve been involved in,” she says. “I’m excited, but also nervous. I hope it is enjoyable for someone who might be in pain. I hope we can help them and make a difference, even if just for a short while.”

Al Hashemi will be performing two of Chopin’s nocturnes, and a composition by Erik Satie.

“I chose calmer music – nothing too lively,” she says. “I think that’s better suited for where we will be performing.”

Al Hashemi’s friend, Eman Al Hashimi, will also be playing the piano, but she will be performing her own original ­compositions.

A writer and a poet, she works in the human resources department of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority and is studying for a master’s degree in quality assurance. She has dabbled with the guitar, the violin, the clarinet and the cello but her first love is the piano.

“I may not have studied music properly, but it is in my blood, it is a part of me,” she says. “As a child, I didn’t care for toys or Barbies or any of that – I just wanted to play with anything that emitted a sound.

“Today, I am at the music every single day, and I’m composing music whenever the fancy strikes, whenever I am inspired – and inspiration comes from everywhere.”

Al Hashimi's compositions have been performed extensively in the UAE. Last year, her orchestral piece, Whispers of an Angel, was performed as part of the National Day festivities.

“In the hospital, I will play my own compositions, very different pieces that are a mix of Arabic and classical,” she says. “They’re just different and I hope will resonate with the patients who hear the music.”

Her music, she explains, is neither complicated nor over-the-top, with nothing to prove – a musician doesn’t “have to be Beethoven to compose”.

“It’s just music with a lot of feeling, and I think it’s the right kind of music to play in a hospital environment,” she says.

Music, she says, has an indescribable power, adding: “Why not the power to heal as well?”

• The Music in Hospitals concert at SKMC, which is free and open to the public, is scheduled to be held in the hospital’s main lobby at 11am on Monday, March 30. For more information, visit www.abudhabifestival.ae