Music for Healing
For her Visual and Performing Arts Education capstone at L.A.'s Alexander Hamilton High School, Angie Lee designed and taught a music and mindfulness curriculum for a class of 20 string ensemble students — pairing solo and ensemble performance skills with visualization, breathing techniques and tools for how to bring mindfulness into performance practice.
"It was a great learning experience for all of us," she said.
The curriculum grew directly out of her musicology thesis, "Sounding Spirituality," which examines sound healing as a clinical intervention for adolescent survivors of verbal abuse. She pulls from psychology, neuroscience, sound studies and spirituality research — a combination that musicology, she said, has the interdisciplinary structure to support at The Herb Alpert School of Music.
"That's the best part of the major," she said — along with her mentor, professor Joy Calico.
Her own pivot from classical performance to sound healing (she plays singing bowls and finished a 200-hour yoga teacher training in her final year at UCLA) feeds directly into her teaching philosophy. Connecting students to their own voice, she said, is the point. In June, she starts an MA program in psychology at Teachers College at Columbia University, where she plans to expand her sound healing research.
