Over the course of a celebrated three-decade musical career, Pittsburgh violinist Monique Mead has performed with major symphony orchestras in the world’s greatest concert halls.Today, in her sunlit Shadyside studio furnished with yoga mats and pillows, she’s creating a group sound bath for a dozen individuals ranging in age from teens to seniors.“Any musical project I’ve ever done,” she says, “has always come from an instinctive place of observing the world around me and then asking, ‘What do we need here?’ If the need is helping people with their mental health so they function better, what can music do to make that happen?”For Mead, the answer is found in the hour-long sound bath sessions she offers three times a week at the Awareness & Wellness Center on Walnut Street.A sound bath is an aural meditation experience that prompts the listener to access deep levels of relaxation. An ancient healing modality used by many indigenous cultures, sound baths have attained renewed popularity as a method of alleviating a host of physical and psychological stresses such as sleep disorders, depression, anxiety and chronic pain.Violinist Monique Mead, who has performed with Leonard Bernstein, uses an assortment of instruments during the sound baths she holds at Awareness and Wellness Center in Shadyside. Photo by John Beale.Mead employs a compact instrumental ensemble (violin, large bronze gong, set of 15 variably-sized quartz crystal singing bowls, wood-frame ocean wave drum and eight-note Koshi chime from the French Pyrenees) that produces an infinite sonic blend of frequencies, dynamics and tone colors for each sound bath.Her cross-cultural explorations are anchored in a robust classical music background. She began playing professionally in her teens, honing her concert skills with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music performance from Indiana University in Bloomington. She spent a Fulbright Scholarship year at Lübeck Academy of Music in Germany where, as a member of the esteemed Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra, she toured Europe with conductor Leonard Bernstein.Since relocating in 2003 from Germany to Pittsburgh, Mead has been involved in dozens of music education initiatives including Azure Pittsburgh’s interactive concert series for families with autism and the Lullaby Project Pittsburgh songwriting program for new parents and caregivers. She has served since 2012 as director of the Music Entrepreneurship program at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Music. Monique Mead plays quartz crystal singing bowls before a sound bath in Shadyside in late August. Video by John Beale.* * *NEXTpittsburgh: When did you become interested in sound therapy?Monique Mead: It was 2008, and I was directing the annual chamber music festival at Rancho La Puerta in Baja California, Mexico. It’s an hour south of San Diego and is one of the top wellness spa destinations in the world. It’s like heaven on earth there.They had started an afternoon event called sound healing, where you lie down on the floor and someone plays these massive crystal singing bowls. At first, I thought, “Not for me!” But I tried it and was amazed.NEXTpittsburgh: It made an immediate impression.Mead: The sound of that drone captured my thoughts. I felt like I got a total reset. My mind is not racing. I’m grounded. I’m just … just calm.Of course, I needed to learn more, and I found a book called “The Healing Power of Sound” by Mitchell Gaynor, the head of oncology at Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York. He had used sound in conjunction with oncology and regular treatments of cancer. His belief was that the body and mind are one and you can’t treat the body without treating the mind … I found it interesting that he was using sound with his patients to get them to address the underlying roots of illness.NEXTpittsburgh: In your sound bath sessions you play the music live, you play all the instruments. You compose the entire experience for the hour. Do you have parameters or a map for how the music progresses?Monique Mead’s sound baths range in age from teens to seniors. Photo by John Beale.Mead: I start with the question, “What’s the sort of journey a person wants?” Somebody is coming in stressed. The first thing they need is a sense of safety. You create safety through repetition. You ground them in the home key, and that has to be C major. And you stay in that home key and then create motifs that repeat.Then there’s a moment of silence, and silence is very important. We’re trying to deepen your sense of stillness. There is no such thing as true silence, ever. Even if you go into an anechoic chamber, you will always hear your own pulse. But more than that, you’re going to hear the noise in your own head, all your thoughts. So what I do is incorporate moments of silence after each sonic soundscape.NEXTpittsburgh: The sound bath process is different than a spoken guided meditation?Mead: Yes. I don’t talk. Once I start doing the music, the music does all the work. The second phase begins when you feel grounded and safe. Let’s take you on a journey. The music moves to drones in D minor. With a drone, there’s no specific moment in time, and if I continue to sustain a drone and fade from one to the other, there is no marking of time. This is the longest soundscape segment, and it creates the sense of drawing within.As we finish, I would like them to come out with a state of expansion. If you think about it, all of our emotions that come from stress, anxiety, fear bring us into a state of constriction. The emotions we feel such as love, acceptance, peace — these are all expansive, so I create tonalities based on pentatonic scales that release them into that expansive state.NEXTpittsburgh: Besides your public sound bath sessions, you offer classes in Sound Practitioner Training.Mead: I realized, as I was getting a little bit more into it, that the greatest contribution I can make is to actually train people in a musical way to do this. With my classes at Carnegie Mellon University during and after the pandemic, I saw that the stress level of the students was so high it absolutely interfered with their ability to study. They were sick, they were not showing up, they were despondent. CMU tripled the size of its mental health offerings, yet people were still struggling every single day. “From this I know, that what I want also wants me,” says Monique Mead as she continues to play quartz crystal singing bowls during a sound bath. Video by John Beale.I thought, all right, what can we do as musicians? Last year, a project team of my students decided to create the Scottie Sound Bath. The sessions were free, and we had faculty, staff, students coming in every week for free sound baths.NEXTpittsburgh: How was the response?Mead: We had 260 people attend over the semester. Then we taught them how to do sound baths for their colleagues. It’s turned into a student organization, and it’s become self-perpetuating.NEXTpittsburgh: You performed several times with the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Did you absorb any of his teaching methods or philosophical principles?Mead: In addition to being the great musician that he was, Bernstein was the greatest communicator of music I have ever encountered. He would exude joy in a performance. Other conductors would give you the technique of what they wanted you to do. Bernstein would give you the feeling.He always traveled with a book of Shakespeare’s plays. Once we were performing Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer’s Night’s Dream,” and he opened the book and read passages about the Queen Fairy. It gave us a clear image of who she was so we could understand on a deeper level what the music was supposed to convey; how you were supposed to feel it yourself so you could make the audience feel it as intensely as possible.Monique Mead’s sound baths immerse participants in sounds and aroma. Photo by John Beale.It was the way he would unpack things, never from a heady way. He’d always go from, “Well, you guys are all young. You know what it’s like to have those spontaneous feelings of rapture.” And you’d tap into that and bring it out in your playing.I saw him do that with audiences from the stage. He would open a window into the music just by saying one thing and giving one image that made everything come to life.NEXTpittsburgh: You were fortunate to have encountered him early in your career.Mead: It made a huge impression on me at age 19. It was thrilling and liberating, and I realized there is a whole world of emotion and experiencing life in playing this music. From that moment I knew I wanted to do that for other people. To make music come to life for them.NEXTpittsburgh: With the sound bath sessions, you’re taking that experience out of a concert hall and creating music that is very personal … music that relates directly to emotional states an individual might be going through at that moment.Mead: This is the most humbling aspect of being a musician. It’s not about you. During the sessions, people are lying down, not even looking at you, and every note you play they’re hearing from such a sensitive perspective because there are no distractions. They are completely within themselves.When I play the violin at the end, that is like a sacred trust, because they are so open and so vulnerable and so sensitized. When you play into that space, you’re playing directly into an open heart. And it’s magical. Very intimate, incredibly beautiful.For me, it’s a spiritual practice in a very, very pure way. Music can make life better for people. I just want people to thrive and feel good so they can live without the burden of whatever they’re carrying.The post Violinist Monique Mead expands her repertoire by creating sound baths appeared first on NEXTpittsburgh.