The Healing Power of Death Metal (music program for disabled veterans)

SLATE
The Healing Power of Death Metal
An innovative new music program for disabled veterans.
By Anne Applebaum
Posted Monday, Aug. 3, 2009, at 8:01 PM ET

[see original for images and hyperlinks]

Two years ago, someone called up Arthur Bloom and made an unusual request: A badly wounded soldier, a former drummer, wanted to start playing music again. Trouble was, he'd lost a leg in Iraq and couldn't use his old drum kit. Did Bloom have any ideas?

As it happened, he did. Bloom is a classically trained pianist who can mix a rap song, a composer whose work has been performed by the Israel Chamber Orchestra, Def Jam Records, and everything in between. Tinkering with musical instruments is the kind of thing he does for fun. Bloom went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, met the drummer, and rigged up a drum set. Then he went back—again, and then again—until finally he founded a program, Musicorps, designed to teach music to disabled soldiers. It wasn't just the appeal of "helping veterans" that drew him in. It was also what he learned about what one of his protégés has memorably described as "the healing power of death metal."

As that phrase perhaps conveys, Bloom's project isn't standard music therapy. On the contrary, after working with a few Walter Reed patients, he realized that what a severely injured person needs isn't just a few guitar lessons or some soothing sounds, but rather what he calls "real" music: serious, one-on-one, customized training, ongoing collaboration, professional mentors. In pursuit of this idea, he persuaded donors to give him instruments, got Steve Jobs to donate computers, and set up what looks like a small recording studio in one of the residential houses at Walter Reed. Bloom started hanging around the house, ready to teach, practice, or produce original music with the vets—or, if so required, to rewrite a piece of piano music so that a one-armed veteran could play it with his artificial hand.

The result? Well, there are halls of residence at Walter Reed where depressed young men sit in their rooms and stare at the walls. And then there is the music session I watched, during which a young soldier with an artificial leg, shrapnel wounds, and no prior musical training practiced complex electric guitar riffs to the pace of an electronic drumbeat. A visiting guitarist kept setting that beat faster and faster, forcing the vet to play faster and faster, until all broke out in howls of laughter. Meanwhile, another soldier, also with an artificial leg, tinkered with his rap lyrics. He hopes to get one of his songs, mixed and recorded at Walter Reed ("it's about being blown up in Iraq"), played on the radio.

It was a cheerful scene, but it was more than that, too. Many of the soldiers at Walter Reed sustained some level of brain damage in the explosions that ripped off their arms or legs; almost by definition, they all have psychological issues stemming from the injury and their war experiences. Dr. Allen Brown, director of brain research and rehabilitation at the Mayo Clinic—and a Musicorps adviser—reckons that because the process of learning to play music requires the use of so many different parts of the brain, it might literally help the brain recover, to compensate for severe injury. Dr. Brown is now working with Bloom, he told me, in order to come up with a way to "clinically evaluate this process," not least so that it can be repeated elsewhere. So far, more than a dozen veterans have been helped by Musicorps. Thousands more could benefit—though nothing involving professional musicians can run on volunteer energy forever.

The project is extraordinary on its own—look at the Musicorps Web site for more details—but it carries a whole constellation of implications. In the spring of 2007, Congress agonized over the fate of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed after a Washington Post investigation into shabby buildings and shabbier bureaucracy at the nation's main military hospital. The fresh paint and better services that resulted from that scandal are only the beginning of what needs to be done.

In truth, it's been a long, long time since there have been so many wounded Americans to care for, and neither our military nor our government is good at inventing customized recovery programs like Musicorps. Entrepreneurs like Bloom can come up with new solutions; the question is whether our health care system and our philanthropic organizations have become too ossified to support them. In its narrow way, the fate of Bloom's program will tell us a lot about how well we are going to care for the thousands of men and women severely wounded in the wars of the last decade, men and women who will go on needing care for many decades to come.
Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History.