Listening In

Indie rocker Kim Deal from the Breeders crooned from the iPod docked in the operating room where Dr. Atul Gawande and his team were performing a thyroidectomy. Wearing something that looks like a shower cap, and booties over my shoes, I felt like another member of Dr. Gawande’s team, which is made up of several people: the senior resident, the anesthesiologist, the circulating nurse, a medical student and the scrub.

“Something of a myth about the way people understand the operating room is that it’s not all about the surgeon,” Dr. Gawande laughs, “or about whether my hands are shaking. Absolutely I have to be able to concentrate and know what I’m doing, but so does everybody else. And having a good operation for each of the patients I take care of in a day means making sure that we can all function as a team. And I find that having music helps us all perform well, as a team.”

To the strains of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy,” Dr. Gawande’s team busily prepared the area on the patient’s neck for the operation. In this episode of Listening In, I got a chance to go to Boston and hear the playlist that Dr. Gawande plays in the OR, and talk to his staff about how it flows with their work.

Hear the original broadcast on Weekend America

 

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Architect Daniel Libeskind listens to a solid block of uninterrupted music in the morning to start his day.  “It’s not something of a luxury, it’s almost a necessity.  And it’s not background,” says Libeskind.  “I don’t do it as the hustle bustle of domestic life and in the background there’s music, I sit down, when I have time, and mostly I do have time early in the morning, just to listen to a piece of music.”  In his downtown New York studio, Libeskind and I listened to the music that focuses him for the day, the music that “furnishes his mind”:  Cab Calloway doing “St. Louis Blues, ” Glenn Gould playing the Well-Tempered Clavier, the 20th organ music of Olivier Messiaen, and the free jazz improvisations of pianist Keith Tippett.
“It’s the equivalent for the soul what running and jogging would be for the body.  It’s not for the body, it’s for the soul.  But the soul also needs to be fed.  Otherwise it’s empty.  And that music, when you fill your mind with it, your mind isn’t empty during the day.  It’s furnished.”

 

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I went to China to see what kind of musical culture I would find among the migrant workers there. I had heard that there is a floating population of over 100 million migrant workers there, mostly from the south and west, mostly coming to work construction jobs in the booming east coast cities. Every year, they ebb and flow, almost to a person returning to their hometown for Chinese New Year. Then, they head to another place, wherever the work is. It is well known that this is a hard, hard life, and hard lives often result in some special form of music – a melancholic complaint, a crying out. In the US, the hard migrant life was acknowledged in the books of John Steinbeck and the songs of Woody Guthrie, to some extent in the songs of Bill Monroe and the bluegrass songwriters who wrote about their lost home and life in a big, unforgiving city.

Was there something like this going on in China now, now that migration is happening there on an unprecedented scale? I tried to find out, by walking cold into construction site after construction site in Beijing, with my fearless translator Flora Wang. These migrant workers downloaded bootleg mp3s onto their cell phones, and they would listen at night in isolation in the grim little shacks that sat right on the construction site. The name “Chen Xing” kept coming up – his songs, many of the workers said, spoke directly to their experience. I sought out Chen Xing, and had a chance to record some of his songs in a casual, acoustic setting. This piece for Studio 360 is the result of those sessions.

 

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Visual artists listen to music in their studios to get their creative juices flowing, to lose themselves in their world, to focus their energies. Natalie Frank, a great young painter (a mere 27 years old!) let me into her listening process and her creative process in her studio. It turned out to be quite structured and complex and cool. She listens to blues and solo singers and songwriters – like John Lee Hooker, Dylan and Nina Simone – in the personal, imagination-trawling phase when she’s conjuring up the characters for her paintings. When she’s composing her paintings – thinking in the big picture sense – she listens to opera and classical music, like Beethoven’s “Kreuzer.” Music is an intricate and orchestrated part of her creative process.

Painting above by Natalie Frank, “Portrait,” 2007, Oil on canvas, 18 by 16 in. 45.7 by 40.6 cm.

 

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Music is a phenomenal way to control your environment – to make a room “yours”.  More and more expectant mothers and fathers who want to make the delivery room feel more like home are bringing their music with them. Birthing clinics are starting to feature iPod docks as standard equipment, and parents come in with their “giving birth” playlists ready to plug in.

Many fathers who get involved are in charge of the technology – and so we find the new role of “DJ Daddy Doulah” – who is doing what he can to set the right mood in the room. In this piece, we speak with Eric Wallach and Belinda Blum about their experience of giving birth to Ruby (pictured) and how Eric spun the tunes. They gave the idea to Emily Conrad and Jeff Galusha – who take us through their Baby Pumpkin playlist, a week before the birth of their daughter, Blue.

We also put a call out to Weekend America listeners to tell us the songs that worked for them during childbirth. The Weekend America “Giving Birth” Listener-Generated Playlist is here.

 

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