Johns Hopkins Hospital (Baltimore, Md)

A violinist plays for her father. A singer takes requests. In hospitals and hospices, bedside performers offer a new kind of care.In the five years my father was languishing in a nursing home in Hamburg, I often brought my violin to play by his bedside. I would prop up my copy of Bach with the help of a water bottle and read through sonatas and partitas I had learned as a teenager, when I was considering a career in music.My father’s reaction was hard to read. His gaze was unchangingly stoic during that final stage of his struggle with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Sometimes my mother saw him attempt to clap. After a halting reading of Bach’s majestic “Chaconne” that would have drawn scorn from the critic in me, we both clearly heard him say “thank you.”One day, a caregiver buttonholed me in the corridor and requested that I play in the day room where they wheeled residents for a change of scenery. As it was, she said, they could all hear me through the walls. She might have picked up on my hesitation: Playing in front of any kind of audience always triggered my anxiety.I agreed, mostly for my father’s sake. But on the appointed day, with my audience fanned out in their beds in various states of consciousness, I found myself playing freely. Nurses glided by on soundless sneakers, a lunch cart clattered in the distance; one woman let out sighs. Afterward, I realized that I had never entered into such a state of flow while playing in public. What had been intended as an act of care for the residents had also healed a tiny bit of the rift in my relationship with the violin.Vocke, Okundaye, Sean Brennan, Lara Bruckmann and Tamara Wellons practice before making their rounds at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.Maansi Srivastava for The New York TimesI shared this story on a brisk January morning in Baltimore in the old boardroom at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where I sat in on a peer supervision session of professional bedside artists. These musicians, all faculty members at the Peabody Institute, are part of a nationwide trend to bring the arts into health care settings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More