Interview: Eva Bojner-Horwitz, The Royal College of Music (KMH), Stockholm

Students: Could you tell something about yourself and your relation to arts and wellbeing?

Eva: I presented my doctoral thesis in 2004 in social medicine, where I evaluated how dance and music affect our bodies. I was measuring biological markers and did hormonal analysis with different stress hormones, evaluated movement patterns pre and post dance and music activities with drawings and with video interpretations. “How do a person nonverbally explain changes of their inner emotional world after music and dance interventions?” In this process I standardized self-figured drawings and video interpretation techniques to be able to see how we nonverbally can explain bodily changes over time after creative activities.

The work has continued in the same area, exploring different artistic nonverbal methodologies on music, dance, drawings and theater with patients, students, teachers and researchers in school systems and health care systems. Today I am working as a professor of music and health here in Sweden. I am affiliated with the Karolinska Institute, giving lectures both nationally and internationally.

S: How do you see the importance of art and creative approach in health care processes?

E: We know that it’s very hard to explain with words processes going on inside of us in the body. We need nonverbal methods to get an idea of what is going on. The art is  the key to communicate and thereby to understand how we truly live our lives in this world. So, for me the art is a meaningful symbol of how we need to explore and continuously help our world to understand that art is part of our original authentic communication. Before we didn’t have words or symbols the first primary thing we used were symbols. Therefore, in the IO3 we are doing a review of the literature of the historical use of esthetics and the arts, so we won´t forget where we came from.

S: Royal College of Music (KMH) educates musicians and music teachers. What music means to you in your personal life?

E: Music opens our amygdala system, the emotional part of our brain, and for me personally, music is a way to get in contact with my body, get in contact with my emotions and also to tune in into what is important in life. It is an easy way to be more aware of my body and my embodied knowledge. If I am working with the frontal part of my brain, the frontal lobe, I´ll not be as authentic as I could be. I use music, passively and actively, to be able to be more in connection with myself and myself in the world.

S: What are your professional highlights in field of arts and wellbeing?

E: I ’d like to highlight the cultural palette work. We received funding for this RCT study so we could work with different artistic work/expressions in the health care systems in Sweden. We invited musicians, dancers, artists, actors, and mindfulness therapists to different patient groups and to health care staff. We saw that patients within this cultural palette started to increase their capacity to verbalize emotions compared to the control group. We also saw that the amount of wellbeing increased compared to the controls. That was a highlight to see how we can use and systematize artistic work in health care centers and hospitals and thereby increase embodied and emotional language.
We have also worked a lot with performance evaluations where we can see what is going on between the audience and artists, for example dancers and musicians. We have started to evaluate flow through heart rate variability measurements, so we see what is going on in between musicians, how they support each other, how they communicate and how they synchronize their work and how this is spread and contained to the audience.

We have also studied so-called knowledge concerts, for example we focused on #metoo themes where strong music concerts, together with satellite seminars enriched the learning environment.

Another interesting research is the “Appassionata project” – a work with kids in preschools. We let them listen to live classical music and see how they perceive it and analyze their responses. Five different researchers are involved in this project. In the other continuum we are focusing on hospices and funeral music.

S: Would you recommend studying in KMH to students who are interested in arts and well-being and why?

E: KMH does have courses in music, health, and well-being, open for everybody.

The different programs are: music teacher program, musician programs, music therapy programs, performing and composing programs and program for directors and producers. And we give lectures in “how to be a sustainable musician” and in entrepreneurship, how to take care of yourself. Because if you can´t take care of yourself, if you are a student, a teacher or a researcher, it´s hard to talk about art and well-being.

S: Why and how did you get involved in this Arthewe project?

E: Burnout and negative stress are unfortunately a very common thing within students life today. To reduce stress or to buffer students against exhaustion very early on is the purpose of the program. The purpose is to help students in an easy way to take care of themselves through arts. I have used different methodologies from my research and evaluated a ten-step program clinically and now we are doing it in the IO4 package. The program has been used for patients, but we are creating it for students.

S: How have you shared leading with David Thyrén?

E: We are working very close with research projects right now and I asked David to join Arthewe project because we collaborate very well. We have different specialties, and we have a lot of respect and trust within our research work. We are also giving lectures together. When you feel you get in contact with your creativity and get a lot of work done together with someone, it´s a good collaboration.

S: What do you think about this way of working when all will happen through internet and virtual meetings? What strengths and challenges might appear?

E: In the beginning I found it was quite alright. But now when we have landed in different concrete things, we´d like to do, I really miss the IRL meetings because you can´t read in between the lines of your colleges online. The positive side is that we don´t need to travel so much, for the climate, but now in the process I really miss IRL meetings. Because we are bodies and artwork is very much non-verbal so when we are using only frontal part of our brain, we miss a lot of the ethical part.

S: What kind of skills/competences do you expect from the students that are participating this project?

E: I think it requires both motivation and a willingness to change your priorities when it comes to cognitive knowledge and embodied knowledge. Being open for the change it´s like to be open to transform your own ideas about the uniqueness of yourself and your body and to be open to read pre signals/warning signals from your body. I think we have a lot of students who are not aware of where they “have” their bodies related to their different conscious levels. The capacity to use inner images, to use hands, to use music, dance movements, role play is key. And if you have an interest in this and you also know there is research and evidence through which you can increase your well-being via the arts and transform yourself into more authenticity, motivation is needed.

S: What are your expectations about this project and collaboration with professionals/students from different fields?

E: My expectation is that our research is going to be running and included in our educational programs, that we have a representative of ten step programs in each of educational system that will help our students in the beginning of their educational career to be more aware of what is important to them and to make their work and body a more sustainable one.