Music For Healing
Maintaining your health and well-being is paramount to enjoying life to the fullest. Particularly when experiencing illness, grief, or trauma, self-care can become an afterthought. Through the intrinsic beauty and healing power of live music, Riverview Chamber Players creates healing environments to support you, giving both individuals and groups the time to relax, reflect, and renew.
Concerts for Healing
Concerts for Healing are curated programs performed by small chamber ensembles that focus on healing. Each concert is tailored to individuals or groups experiencing illness, grief, or trauma, and in need of a place of beauty, comfort, and hope.
The music provides a safe haven and allows for internal reflection and connections. It can bring listeners together in their common humanity, and often leads to a renewed sense of hope and joy.
These performances are customized to your situation and needs. The first step is to tell us a bit more about YOU —
Therapeutic Music Sessions
Rebecca Strauss is a Certified Music Practitioner who performs live acoustic therapeutic music sessions for individuals who are ill or dying or for anyone in need of respite. She adapts the music to the needs of the client in the moment, inviting the relaxation response to unfold. The result is often a sense of release and rejuvenation.
The music may create a space for you to relax, breathe, and connect with your inner world and emotions. Your job is simply to be open to receiving it.
These sessions can take place via Zoom or in-person. In either case, it's essential that Rebecca be able to see you — the client or patient — in order to observe and adapt the music to your condition, mood, and state.
Consider purchasing these healing music sessions as a special gift for a loved one.
A highly accomplished classical violist and Music Director of Riverview Chamber Players, Rebecca Strauss is passionate about designing, producing, and performing innovative music programs. These creative programs are crafted to respond to social justice issues, promote healing, invite community involvement, and help build a sustainable healing landscape that opens the door for personal transformation and empowerment.
Over the past two decades, Rebecca has produced music healing events that address trauma for families of homicide victims, incarcerated men and women, hospital patients, and individuals in homeless shelters. Simply put, music for healing is a throughline in most of what she does.
OR… It would be fair to say that the healing power of music is a consistent theme in most of what she does.
There is truly no end to the impact that healing music has on those it serves. Whether performed in Buckingham Palace for Princess Anne, in a prison for incarcerated individuals, in a church for the mother of a murder victim, or in a hospital for a patient on a ventilator, the results are consistent. Healing music often leads to relaxation and a renewed sense of energy and hope— as well as a release of physical and emotional pain, a soothing of anxiety, a connection to one’s inner world, and even an awakening of the senses.
In 2018, Rebecca performed solo viola at Buckingham Palace at an event hosted by Her Royal Highness, The Princess Royal (Princess Anne). The occasion was for the ASCENT Initiative, a combined partnership between the Acid Survivors Trust International and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School, serving survivors of acid violence worldwide.
In her role as a Certified Music Practitioner, Rebecca performs therapeutic music sessions for patients who are ill or dying, those suffering from trauma, or anyone else in need of comfort. She works in the ventilator unit and long-term rehab units at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and has provided sessions in other hospice, long-term dementia, rehab, and spinal cord injury units.
Upon her entering the room a patient stated: 'Oh, heaven is here. I'm in heaven.' After the therapeutic music session, the patient said: 'What a great day this is. Your music took away all the bullshit. I’m going to call you Doctor Viola!'
More about Rebecca
Teaches the “Music as a Healing Art” course at Longy School of Music of Bard College
Conceived and created “Harmony & Hope: Responding to Violence with Music,” an annual performance and community event to support families of homicide victims.
Performed for, and in collaboration with, inmates at MCI Norfolk Prison as part of the Restorative Justice Responsibility Retreat
Develops and performs chamber music programs, as part of Shelter Music Boston, in homeless shelters serving both adults and children.
Featured speaker, panelist, and participant in several events focused on Music and Health at the Berklee College of Music and Longy School of Music of Bard College.
What Patients & Their Loved Ones Say:
“Many, many thanks for so generously sharing your time and your talent to play soothing music for my mother (and for her 104-year-old best friend) this afternoon. All the music you selected and played was not only soothing but beautiful. You gave a great gift to two very frail, very elderly, and very ill ladies." —Will A.
“I want to thank you again for all your beautiful playing and your lovely presence at Sylvia’s side when she left us. You were the angel that called to her and enabled her to leave us in perfect peace.” —Susan F.
"This is one of the last pleasures I have left. Thank you so much for playing music for me.”—patient in longterm care
"I really think the quality of my sleep was different. After the session, I fell right asleep and woke up with a different, smoothed feeling. It was such a gift. I felt the music directly reach me—it was indeed soothing. Simply put, it works!"
“I can’t picture my life without music. It saves me. It is so healing for your spirit. I feel extra breath coming into my body. There is hope. I am feeling things I wasn’t feeling before hearing the music. I hear your heart [to me].” —Sharina J.
“I don’t try to think. The thoughts of things that have been troubling me just pop up. It is like the thoughts are wrapped in music and I am in a safe place to think about them, deal with them, and cleanse myself of them. It is cleansing because you know you need to think about them, but you haven’t been wanting to, maybe because it is painful or not pleasant. It is like a movie soundtrack behind my thoughts. The music makes me feel safe. If the music was an entity it is like a cozy room that won’t let any bad in. There are no judgments. I can think about them and get them out. I can think about the thoughts more clearly, calmly, and safely.” —Dorothy M.
“Rebecca, that sounds nice. You know, when you are here it changes everything on the unit; everyone stops to listen. I just want you to know that the music is very therapeutic.”—patient on ventilator unit