Yo-Yo Ma Helps Announce Vital Sounds Initiative

Project: Music Heals Us to Offer Over $80,000 in Grants for COVID Relief Efforts Eight US Arts Organizations will Receive Grants to Initiate One-on-One, Digital Bedside Concert Programs for Hospitalized COVID Patients

New York, NY - This weekend, Yo-Yo Ma helped announce the launch of the Vital Sounds Initiative, the next phase of PROJECT: MUSIC HEALS US (PMHU) digital bedside concerts programming for hospitalized COVID patients. Mr. Ma, who has himself participated as a musician in these concerts, remarks on the program: “I can personally testify that when we’re looking for meaning and purpose at a time when many of the usual avenues of expression are not open for us to explore [...] this is actually one of the best things one can do as a musician during this crucial time when people need you.”

PROJECT: MUSIC HEALS US (PMHU) is a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide inspiration, education and healing through live music performances and interactive programming to marginalized communities across the United States, with a focus on the disabled, rehabilitating, incarcerated, and homeless. In order to continue its mission amidst the pandemic, since early April 2020, PMHU has been offering its programming through one-on-one concerts via video livestream platforms to society's most isolated and vulnerable: COVID patients hospitalized across the country. Since the release of a New York Times article featuring PMHU’s digital bedside concert programs, hundreds of musicians have joined the cause, including such notable artists and ensembles as Time For Three, the Miro Quartet, internationally acclaimed violinist Timothy Chooi, and renowned pianist Emanuel Ax. 

With the launch of the Vital Sounds Initiative, PMHU will offer over $80,000 in grants to arts organizations and ensembles in order to lay the groundwork for a sustainable national network of artists united in using the Arts in service of patient rehabilitation, while leveraging collective resources to create a scalable initiative greater than the sum of any individual efforts. The initiative will address two concurrent sources of desperation affecting two seemingly unrelated groups: COVID patients and their care-givers, and performing artists who have had their livelihoods threatened by the shutdown of live arts programming. Eight partnership grants, alongside PMHU’s continuing in-house programs, will provide over 6,000 hours of music for patients and staff at hospitals and in-patient health centers across the country over the next year. Six of the eight grants will go to the following pre-chosen organizations and ensembles:

?  American Modern Opera Company - Boston, MA
?  Challenge the Stats - Atlanta, Georgia
?  Crescent City Chamber Music Festival - New Orleans, LA
?  Emerald City Music - Seattle, WA
?  Imani Winds - New York, NY
?  Salastina - Los Angeles, CA
 
The final two grants will be offered through a competitive application process to US-based arts organizations and ensembles wishing to bring the initiative into their local communities. The grant application portal will be available at www.pmhu.org; the portal will open on September 15th and close at 11:59pm ET on September 30th. Winners will be determined and announced by the end of October 2020.

PMHU Co-Directors Molly Carr and Andrew Janss remark on the Vital Sounds Initiative: “With today’s technology, PMHU and its musicians have been given a unique opportunity to provide a dose of humanity and community to hospitalized patients in isolation like no other time in modern history. Beyond the physical affliction and necessary medical precautions banning family and loved ones from hospital visitation, this disease has forced even the patients’ own caregivers to avoid prolonged physical exposure. This level of isolation is resulting in a mental health crisis for both patients and care-givers that has unfortunately, but understandably, had to take a back seat to managing the diseases’ devastating physiological effects. PMHU’s one-on-one live-streamed concerts, conceived and originated in consultation with ICU staff at NY Presbyterian Hospital and now operating in over a dozen hospitals across the US, have come as close as anything we have seen to creating environments that are able to encourage holistic healing through the nurturing human connections that this virus has taken away. For this reason, we could not be more excited for the launch of the Vital Sounds Initiative, as this new phase of our digital bedside concerts programming will allow continued expansion - potentially reaching thousands of patients in isolation around the country.”

MEDIA CONTACT:

Andrew Janss

Co-Director - Project: Music Heals Us

805-807-6323

andrew@pmhu.org

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