For the great soprano Renée Fleming, music is so much more than a collection of pretty notes. The five-time Grammy winner and Kennedy Center honoree says that music — and all of the arts — have an enormous capacity to improve our health.
Fleming takes a deep dive into the latest research around music and health in the new collection of essays she edited, "Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness."
Fleming told KCUR's Up To Date that she started researching the connection between the arts and wellness as a way to overcome her oftentimes debilitating stage fright.
"I was having difficulty performing because the pressure of performance created a pain, and so I wanted to understand the mind-body connection," says Fleming.
Fleming will be in Kansas City this Thursday, Sept. 26 through Sunday, Sept. 29 for performances with the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. She says she's excited about science's findings around singing.
"Like the fact that those who have serious post-partum depression benefit even more from singing in a choir than those that don't," she says. "These are the things that come along and I think, 'Wow, I didn't see that coming.'"
While there's still so much to learn about the subject, Fleming believes it's not too early to begin applying what scientists already do know.
"I mean, the science is there, it's good enough to kind of already start to embed these things into our healthcare system because it's low cost, it's not pharmaceutical and it's not invasive," she says.
- Renée Fleming, soprano
Note: Lyric Opera KC is a financial supporter of KCUR. Our journalism is editorially independent of funders.
