Fun in the moment
“Music speaks. It resonates. Particularly, it resonates with music that members sang in their late teens and early twenties,” said Professor of Conducting Rachel Cornacchio.
She conducts the Sing for the Moment choir, a group of patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia along with their caregivers.
The majority of choir members range in age from their 70s to their 80s. They meet each Wednesday at Bethany Village in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.
Alzheimer’s hits close to home for Cornacchio. Her grandmother suffered from the disease. Also, her mother worked as a nurse in a nursing home’s memory care unit. “[My grandmother] loved music and she loved to sing, even though she wasn’t terribly gifted in it,” recalled Cornacchio. “Until her last week of life, she was singing hymns, recalling every word to every verse.”
How could her grandmother suffer from memory loss yet remember hymns she sang in her teens?
“I could ramble off a good bit of data to help make scientific sense of what happens neurologically when members interact with music, but the nuts and bolts of it are actually quite simple,” said Cornacchio. “There is a part of the brain that stores musical memories. Research tells us that memories stored there between the ages of 15 and 22 are unaffected by Alzheimer’s disease.”
As a result, you’ll find this choir singing hits like “She Loves You” by the Beatles or the well-known standard, “Route 66.”
Not only does the music help with memory, but it boosts mood, too. “When people hear a song with which they have familiarity, it brings with it a sense of calm, because it is just that: familiar,” she explained.
Cornacchio says working with the choir has become the highlight of her week and invites volunteers to future rehearsals. “We’re always looking for folks to sing alongside members to help turn pages and get them from sitting to standing,” she said. “Singing experience is not a requirement.”
—Jake Miaczynski ’20