The scene is Calcutta, India. It is hot, noisy and crowded outside, but inside Mother Teresa's Home for the Dying and Destitute it is serene. Wayne Gremminger has brought his guitar from Colorado and is playing for the residents. Kalighat is a hospice, started by Mother Teresa, where the duties volunteers like Wayne, primarily include giving respectful and loving care to its residents.
Wayne has been playing guitar all his life and brought an old guitar to India on a whim, not sure it would survive the airplane's checked baggage compartment. After helping with normal volunteer responsibilities at Kalighat, Wayne went from cot to cot, playing guitar as a personal way to express his heartfelt feelings for each of the patients. One day a doctor tapped him on the shoulder and described several positive changes patients had shown, and attributed them to the music he was playing. His examples were varied and included benefits ranging from noticing increased appetites to an extraordinary description of how only a few minutes before, a blind man, in very poor health, had asked the doctor to help him stand…so he could dance! He called Wayne's guitar a "magic box". This is the origin of the "Magicbox Project".
The mission statement for the Magicbox Project is "to explore, illuminate and utilize the awesome power live music has to help heal body and spirit". While there are many outstanding individuals and organizations dedicated to healing by playing music, the Magicbox Project is set aside by two important goals. The first and most significant is that of facilitating clinical research which will provide scientific data, helping to determine the areas of health care that proves to benefit most by the music. The second important distinctive goal is to focus on making those findings ( and subsequent success stories) known to the public as well as the medical community.
This objective would not only illuminate findings from the Magicbox Project research but also gather important testimonials from the wide range of groups and individuals also engaged in playing music assisting those in the healing process. Each day there are wonderful heart warming stories related to the awesome power that empathetically performed music provides. The simple act of making these stories known and documented will be invaluable to further this cause and create credibility within the medical community.
A recent clinical study by the University Of Wisconsin Medical School was conducted to analyze the effect empathy shown toward patients by their doctors had regarding the healing time associated with the common cold (see www.med.wis.edu/new-events/study...empathy.../1208). If research (qualitative and quantitative) can be carried out for a concept as subjective as empathy, the same template could be used to scientifically study healing effects of music. Other studies have proven the effects music has on heart rate and there has even been research to suggest patients who have listened to music prior to surgery may require less anesthesia (www.livescience.com/health/050525_music_surgery.html).
Is it not time to further explore this concept? Wayne has been consulting doctors, hospitals and other health care providers to uncover areas of medicine best suited for clinical trials. The possibilities are extensive. The next step will be to identify those medical professionals willing to help develop and conduct the scientific research. The Magicbox Project will provide and fund the music/musician as well as reporting the findings. In order to fund these two activities, the Magicbox Project will rely initially on conventional methods (grants, donations, benefit concerts) as well as unconventional ideas which are almost limitless. To include live music as an adjunct to the medical plan may seem unconventional to much of the established medical community, but it is time to open these doors by opening our minds. "Where there is a will…there is a way," and Wayne is determined to proceed with unrelenting resolve to advance the cause of the Magicbox Project and its mission.
In conclusion, read Wayne's personal and sincere appeal:
First, let me thank you for your interest in the Magicbox Project. The project is not about me, Calcutta, or my goals in life. It is about the vision that one day the powerful combination of love, empathy and live music will be an accepted and commonly used adjunct to medical treatment, aiding the healing process. Up to this point, I have proceeded in life as a somewhat passive observer, reacting to circumstance and fate like a sailboat without a sail. After my trip to India, I finally plotted a direction and have trimmed the sails with each person I have played for since my return. I have vowed to become proactive and pursue with unyielding conviction a specific course to "explore, illuminate and utilize the awesome power live music has to help heal body and spirit.
One day my name and the origin for the projects vision will be a footnote in this web site and please know that all ideas, help, advice and encouragement to that end will be most assuredly appreciated. Who knows…maybe one day every hospital will have a resident musician applying the powerful combination of empathy, love and live music, to help heal.
There is nothing special about Wayne Gremminger. He has been playing guitar since age eleven. He may be a bit more sensitive than some but most ways a common "everyman". A seeker of truth…no doubt, with all the emotional scars to which many serious seekers may attest. He suspects we are all spiritual beings disillusioned by the concept that humans are somehow separate from their creator. He does not proselytize or preach. He has no answers. He makes an effort to begin each day, regarding truth, as a blank slate (or blank computer screen for those less than 50 years old). He walks the path each day. He has seen, experienced and felt deeply each step of the way. He has an artist's eye, loving heart and a natural acutely developed gift for expressing feelings that vibrate from his guitar. He has a well rounded and diverse life of experience that will be needed to advance the destiny, yet unknown, for the Magixbox Project.