CASPER, Wyo. — Mikayla Fulwider holds a small, black acoustic guitar as her audience gets situated in comfortable chairs set in a semi-circle around the room on a recent weekday afternoon.
She gets feedback almost immediately after performing John Denver’s gentle classic “Sunshine on my Shoulders.”
“I like the way you sing,” said a woman in back. It’s not much longer before others in attendance are talking as well, recalling long-buried memories about school, work, childhood and old flames.
The interruptions are expected as well as encouraged. In fact, that’s mostly the point of this small concert for residents at Mountain Plaza Assisted Living. Each week, for about one hour, Mikayla and her fellow music therapists from Vibes Fine & Performing Arts give personalized performances that include songs from over the decades, conversations and sometimes dancing and clapping.
“Music is one of the only things that uses all parts of your brain at once,” said Dylan Ashburn, operations manager at Vibes, “which is why music therapy is such an important and effective tool.”
Vibes music therapy supervisor Zane Rutledge says that music therapy started to be accepted as a healthcare profession in the late 1950s. Therapy can be used to address a variety of issues, from mental health and behavior to dementia, medical issues such as premature babies and cancer treatments.
More recent studies tend to support the positive effects of music therapy. A 2013 study at Beth Israel Medical Center’s Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine compared the heart rates of premature babies in the NICU as parents sang lullabies and as music therapists played two different instruments. While the heart rates slowed in all cases, the music therapists playing soft, drum-like instruments were most effective at relaxing the babies in a noisy hospital environment. The therapy also tended to relax the parents.
“The NICU is a really fascinating population for music therapy,” said Zane. “[Their heart rate] will usually be around 160 beats per minute when you walk in, and within five minutes they’re down to like 120 or 130.” Research has also seen positive results in neurological development and weight gain with babies who receive music therapy, according to Zane.
That cognitive benefit also extends to dementia patients, who can see improvements in cognition while experiencing dementia. Other applications include pain management in hospital patients and in various aspects of mental health.
Though widely accepted, it took decades of research and practical experience before the practice started seeing real growth. Zane says there are some 10,000 music therapists practicing in the U.S., but Wyoming has only eight.
Vibes currently has four of Wyoming’s music therapists, according to Dylan, and since the program launched in 2019 it has grown into a significant part of their business. It all started when Zane was hired.
“He came aboard in August 2019, and then nine months later everything shut down with the pandemic,” said Dylan. “It was a little bit of a reset for what we were working on as a business; everybody closed their doors and everybody was online.”
Mountain Plaza was among the earliest clients to use Vibes’ musical therapist program, but the devastating effect of the pandemic on assisted living facilities meant working directly with elderly clients would be impossible for months.
Eventually, they were able to work with young patients at the Wyoming Behavioral Institute, and later with the Banner Wyoming Medical Center as restrictions eased. They’ve steadily expanded their client base, adding Wyoming Dementia Care, the Child Development Center and numerous other assisted living facilities in the county.
“Just listening to music can be an experience that helps people to break down barriers, so we can use that ability and that language to achieve things that other therapies may not be able to crack,” Dylan said.
Music therapy as a profession demands a lot more than musicianship, which is certainly a requirement. Zane describes his path into the profession as something of a happy accident. He originally intended to pursue pre-med, but ended up in music therapy because of generous scholarships yet remained somewhat skeptical about the profession.
He remembers the skepticism fading during an early class where an instructor asked students to “bring in a song that represents where we are in that moment.”
One student brought in a David Bowie song. As the instructor analyzed the song’s structure — how it stayed predictable before slowly becoming more chaotic — he asked the student if that’s what she relates to.
“She started crying and left the room,” he recalls. “So I don’t know what the answer was, but the idea of how this man simply asked a question, and how it was so significant for her because she had translated it into a metaphor, I was just baffled at how cool that was.”
“It just kind of clicked,” he said. “It was a way for me to engage in music, which was significant for me as I was going through high school, and also to help and support people, which is why I wanted to be in the medical field.”
Voice is essential in music therapy, but proficiency with other instruments is also required. Abilities on guitar, keyboards and wind instruments all come in handy, along with basic rhythm and percussion. How people identify with particular songs or pieces of music is entirely individual, said Zane. “At the end of the day, it’s mostly what you’re connecting with,” he said.
Three of Vibes’s four music therapists attended the session at Mountain Plaza: Zane, Mikayla and Karoline Thompson. Their fourth, Nicasia Rivera, was on another assignment.
After Mikayla’s variety of classics that sprinkled in early-’50s pop to ’70s-era country, Zane took over with higher energy selections such as “Hit the Road, Jack,” and “Blue Suede Shoes.” Mikayla and Karoline handed out shakers and tambourines to the residents. Some played along, others clapped and at least one danced with a staff member.
The work is joyful and challenging, said Zane. Teens at WBI are difficult to reach sometimes, but it’s the dementia patients that can leave an emotional mark.
The positive impact music therapy has on patients is significant, and most importantly it gives their families and caregivers precious moments that would otherwise be lost.
However, no one person or type of therapy can stop the inevitable.
“When you work with them for a long time and you slowly see them not remember things,” he said, “that’s tough, knowing that I could be the best music therapist in the world, and the best I can do is make it just a little slower.”
