Encore, Encore: Giving Voice to People Living with Dementia

Encore, Encore: Giving Voice to People Living with Dementia
Saturday, September 21, 3:30 PM
Presented by Michael Alan Anderson PhD
Performing Arts Center, Brewster, MA

About the Lecture
Nearly 7 million Americans have Alzheimer’s Disease or another form of dementia. About one in nine people age 65 and older currently live with the disease; after age 85, one in three will have Alzheimer’s. And there are no FDA- approved treatments to prevent or cure it. Numerous studies have shown that interventions through music are effective as a potential non-pharmacological therapy for people with dementia. Choral singing is the most popular artistic activity among Americans, with one in six adults singing in one or more choruses. Michael Alan Anderson is the founder and program director of the ENCORE Chorus, an intergenerational chorus from Rochester, New York serving people living with early- to middle-stage Alzheimer’s disease and their care partners. The chorus is modeled on the Giving Voice Initiative, which fosters the creation and operation of independent choruses that bring joy, well-being, purpose, and community understanding to people with Alzheimer’s Disease and their care partners. This talk reviews the power of the musical arts for this vulnerable population, unveils the Giving Voice template for organizing choruses of this type, and describes enhancements to the choral experience taken in ENCORE.

About Michael Alan Anderson
Michael Alan Anderson, Professor of Musicology at Eastman School of Music, specializes in a wide range of issues related to sacred music from the fourteenth through the sixteenth century, with emphasis on lay devotion and saints. He is the author of Music and Performance in the Book of Hours (Routledge Press, 2022) and St. Anne in Renaissance Music: Devotion and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Anderson’s articles have appeared in various peer-reviewed journals, and he is a two-time winner of ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award for outstanding writing about music, for articles published in Early Music History (2011) and in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2013).
Since 2008, Anderson has served as artistic director of Schola Antiqua, a Chicago-based professional early music ensemble. Specializing in the performance of medieval plainchant and Renaissance polyphony, the group currently serves as artists in residence at the Lumen Christi Institute in Chicago. Anderson’s work with Schola Antiqua has been defined by invitations to collaborate with art exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other museums including the Morgan Library & Museum, The Newberry Library, the Art Institute of Chicago, and locally in Rochester at the Memorial Art Gallery.
As managing editor of the Eastman Case Studies series, Anderson wrote more than 20 case studies and supervised the publication of 10 volumes of essays examining contemporary issues in the musical arts landscape around the world. The University of Rochester awarded him a Bridging Fellowship in 2019 for study in the Simon School of Business to enhance his work with the case studies series. A case study Anderson published involving The Phoenix Symphony’s participation in clinical research with Alzheimer’s patients has led to his involvement with Eastman Performing Arts Medicine and the Sound Health Working Group at the University of Rochester, two efforts exploring the collaborative potential of music within and outside health care environments. Through the Eastman Community Music School, Anderson helped to establish the ENCORE Chorus for persons living with dementia, their care partners, and an intergenerational team of volunteers. He now serves on the National Advisory Council of the Giving Voice Initiative and has become a member of the University of Rochester Aging Institute.

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