Leigh Scully looks at her husband and asks, “Did you enjoy the singing, honey?”
“Music. Music. Music. I love it,” Peter Scully she says with a smile and a drumroll between each word.
Peter, who lives with dementia, fell in love with the Everly Brothers when he was a young teenager. “When they were in Australia, I would sneak over to my uncle’s so I could be in the…” He hesitates over the word.
“The performance?” Leigh asks.
“Yes,” says Peter. “And I did that the rest of my life.”
Today’s concert, however, is the Good Life Chorus (GLC) choir in West Ryde and it’s an open invitation. Like clockwork, the participants file in through the front of the community hall for a 1.30pm start. Most arrive in pairs, elbows together, moving at a steady pace, stopping only to sign in, drop a gold coin into a biscuit tin and find their name tags, which take up an entire table at the back, all 50 of them. Chatter and clatter fill the room with joyful purpose.
The choir, run entirely by volunteers, meets every Wednesday and is “more of a sing-along than a choir,” says conductor Brian Hayes. Many of the choir members at GLC are living with dementia. They attend weekly rehearsals with their partners or loved ones, who are also usually their caregivers.
Carol and Tony sit up front; Denise and Bruce find their favorite row; Leigh and Peter settle in at the back; and Dr. Michelle Wong and her mother-in-law Jing sit in an aisle seat, making room for Jing’s walker. With the help of Rosemary Eliott, the choir’s president, a projector plays YouTube versions of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, What A Wonderful World, and Sweet Caroline. Eliott, I come to learn, is the thread that holds this colorful group of characters together.
There are more men with dementia attending GLC (brought in by their female carers) than women with dementia. However, this does not reflect the statistics. Women and men under 80 are generally equal risk for all forms of dementia – unlike Alzheimer’s disease. In those 90 and older, dementia strikes women at a rate 1.4 times as much as in men.
In 2023 there will be more than 400,000 Australians were living with the neurological condition dementia. Experts estimate that the number of adults living with the condition worldwide could reach 153 million by 2050. The lack of a cure or definitive medical treatment has led researchers and practitioners to rely on psychosocial approaches to better support people with dementia.
Music, Peter says, “is crucial” to his well-being. In the last few decades, researchers have effects music has on people living with dementia. For example, studies have found that caregivers singing the steps of daily tasks, such as dressing, washing and brushing teeth, can help people with dementia maintain their personal hygiene in a calm and fun environment. The Sydney Conservatorium of Music with the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre is groundbreaking research into musical interventions: whether learning to play a musical instrument or singing in a choir can improve cognition in people with very mild memory problems, before dementia develops. But for those who choose to sing in choirs focused on dementia, numerous studies have shown significant benefits. improvements in communication, mood, well-being and quality of life.
It is often thought – or feared – that people with dementia lose the ability to continue doing the things they love. The choir breaks that misconception. It reconnects people with dementia with something they knew and loved before their diagnosis. “It’s really good for (Peter) to do this,” Leigh says. “Because the songs are so well known … you don’t have to be a musical genius. And even if you’re deep into dementia, it takes you back.”
Jing Lee would love to sing at the Opera House, she says, but instead sings at GLC, with the help of her son Jeff and his wife, Dr. Michelle Wong. “It’s really helped us get out of the house and connect,” Wong says.
Carol Cullen has been taking her husband Tony, who has dementia, to GLC since last year. They sit together in the front row, in matching grey jumpers – Tony in a Peaky Blinders hat. He can play music by ear, Carol boasts.
“Do you know how that happened?” Tony turns his attention to me. Suddenly he’s back to the time when he was a young man, always getting into trouble. He explains, with a little help from Carol, how he couldn’t read sheet music but gradually learned the melodies of songs his sister played on the piano. He’s been a pianist ever since.
“If you think about it, music has played a role in most people’s lives at some point, so even if other forms of memory are no longer retained, musical memory can be retained very well,” says Dr Rose Capp, a policy advisor for Dementia Australia and a lecturer in applied gerontology at Flinders University. In her book Demystifying Dementia, Capp writes about the two types of long-term memory (explicit and implicit) and how “music is stored in different parts of the temporal lobe to other forms of long-term memory”.
“(Implicit memory) is often labeled as unconscious or automatic because it requires no active effort,” Capp writes, using the example of riding a bike. “Decades can go by, but when you get back on your bike, you can ride without thinking about what to do.” As people with dementia begin to lose their explicit memory – the part of the brain that recalls previously learned information and requires “conscious effort” to retain it – implicit memory, where scientists say elements of music are stored, may be preserved.
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Hayes and pianist Malcolm Edey supplement the weekly programme with well-known numbers for the choir: there is jazz, blues, musical numbers and the familiar Happy Birthday.
“One of the biggest things that happens to people with dementia is that they withdraw or stop participating,” Hayes says. “For this group, we have to be very careful not to create situations where people feel threatened, where (they feel) they have to respond verbally (when they) can’t remember words.”
People can join in if they feel like it, or sit back and watch others. “We’re open to people of all abilities. That’s the point. And we sound surprisingly good, so that’s really rewarding,” says Edey. The extra physical stimulation of rehearsals – choir members are encouraged to “move and groove” from their seats – is also beneficial for supporting abdominal breathing, posture and mobility in people with dementia, says Capp, who runs a residential care choir in Brighton East, Victoria.
Since 2016, similar choirs have existed across Australia. GLC is modeled on Canberra’s Alchemy Choir; Dubbo Sing Out Choir had its first big concert last year; and music therapist Dr Zara Thompson from the University of Melbourne leads a Rewire Musical Memories choir in Ivanhoe, in Melbourne’s north-east. Choir leaders meet regularly via Zoom as part of the Network of Dementia-Inclusive Choirs across Australia, where Thompson is the network coordinator.
A small number of test choirs have been performed in other countries. independent study in France brought together a group of people with dementia, caregivers and volunteers for 14 rehearsals that culminated in a Christmas concert in 2018. Despite some challenges, people with dementia “demonstrated the ability to learn new songs, integrate rhythmic accompaniments, (and) sing in different languages,” said Jean-Bernard Mabire, a co-author of the study. Although “several participants could no longer remember singing in front of an audience,” Mabire said the immediate benefits he observed were “more important than the memory of the event.”.
Thompson’s choir arose from similar research in 2016. “Our members were so determined that it couldn’t stop after the investigation, they forced them to hire me,” she laughs. “They made (me) sign a contract saying we would never finish it.”
What sets dementia-inclusive choirs apart from other support groups, Thompson says, is that being a participant doesn’t mean sitting in a circle and being forced to talk about your problems. “You don’t have to be too vulnerable. It doesn’t feel clinical. The music holds the space, so they can just look at someone and know that the other person knows what they’re going through.”
People with dementia and their caregivers are often at high risk for depression. Loneliness and isolation are thought to worsen dementia symptoms. While the benefits of singing and community have been shown to improve dementia symptoms and tackle loneliness, such choirs – often very cheap to attend – can still be hard to find. All choir members stress the importance of government funding to ensure that choirs like theirs survive, and that more can open.
“There are a lot of people with dementia who need stimulation (and who) could come to (the choir) and get a lot of benefit from it. But we had to find it ourselves,” Leigh says.
Denise Jamieson drives almost an hour from Peakhurst, in Sydney’s south, to take her husband Bruce, who has advanced dementia, to rehearsals. Bruce used to sing in the Sydney Male Choir and although his ability has changed since then, “it’s good because I see him doing something he enjoys, and something he’s enjoyed for a long time,” Denise says.
A week after Bruce – who struggles to speak – sang his favourite song, Happy Birthday, to the Guardian Australia video team, I return for another visit. Bruce is sitting in the foyer, tapping his hands and feet to Singin’ in the Rain. I don’t expect him to recognise me, let alone remember me, but as soon as I start looking for a spot, he points in my direction and smiles. And the singing continues.