(back to list ) January 2010

In the January newsletter I am pleased to feature our “Composer-of-the-Month” Neil Rolnick, who writes about his own personal experience of hearing loss in one ear. His composition “MONO” will be featured on the April 19th concert of Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival. Miles of Hope Breast Cancer Foundation’s Executive Director Pari Foroord has written a moving article and will be participating in a pre-concert panel on April 5th at 6:30.

Imagine the unimaginable. You find a lump in your breast. You go to the doctor and it is confirmed through testing that you have breast cancer. Now what?

According to the American Cancer Society, excluding cancers of the skin, breast cancer is the most common cancer among women, accounting for more than 1 in 4 cancers diagnosed in the US. In 2008, there were 182,460 new cases of breast cancer in women in the United States. The 5 year relative survival rate for breast cancer in the localized stage (cancer that has not spread to other sites in the body) is 98%. The earlier the cancer is diagnosed, the more successful the treatment.

The federal government along with private agencies and foundations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on cancer research each year and they should be commended for all of the major treatment breakthroughs in the past 25 years. However, there is still an area that is often times ignored or at best relegated to a back burner when determining overall patient care and that is how is the patient’s psychological status affected by this diagnosis.

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Music To Heal A Broken Ear
Neil Rolnick

People speak of the healing powers of music and art, which is something I do believe in. However, my experience is somewhat different. The piece I’ll perform on the April 19th concert for Cutting Edge is a reaction to a personal bit of ill-health, a study for a larger piece I’m writing called MONO. I lost the hearing in my left ear over about an hour and a half on March 31, 2008. In the nearly two years since then I’ve turned to music not to heal my broken ear, but to nurture my soul and deepen my relationships to those around me. And it’s not been about listening to music, but about writing it.

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