One of our musicians, Jodi Beder, was featured on the front-page of The Washington Post on March 26, in an article about the good things people are doing for others during the pandemic.

Jodi is playing daily from her front porch, sending healing music out to her community for all who come to listen. At the end of the article, she mentions her affiliation with A Musical Heart.

Here’s an excerpt from the article in The Post:

After her performance ended, and the strains of Bach, Randy Newman and an old klezmer song faded from 34th Street, Jodi Beder sat on her front porch with her cello and blew a kiss to her fans on the sidewalk.

People clapped and yelled “Thank you Jodi!” from across the street. They said they needed it. She said she needed it too. Beder normally plays her cello for people in hospice care. Many are in need of care, she said. “I think we need it enormously,” Beder said. “I’m administering treatment.”

… Beder, 69, said she started her mini concerts a week ago, with a cello made around 1870 in Prague. “It’s not that old for a cello,” she said.

Jodi Beder plays music on her cello from her front porch in Mount Rainier, Md. on Wednesday.

Beder is a member of the group A Musical Heart, which plays music to hospice patients.

From The Washington Post, March 26, 2020, by Michael E. Ruane

If you’re a subscriber to The Washington Post, you can read the entire article.

Today, March 1, the month of spring. A great day to launch our new website, and share our goals and news. We have two new musicians joining us. They are wonderful and well-suited to playing/singing for hospice patients. Read about Sarah Issaelkhoury, voice, and Gray Dickerson, violin, on the “Musicians” page. That makes seven of us, total. We hope to have many more, because the Washington, DC area has many hospice patients at any given time who would be comforted by music as they transition.

So our goals are to increase our musician roster, raise money to support the greater numbers, and make music available to more hospice patients at their bedside.

Another goal, more broad, is to make people, who are not facing death, more comfortable with the idea of their own death. By sharing some stories and experiences of patients near the end, and contributing to the current national conversations about end-of-life, people come to terms with their mortality. By doing so, it’s easier to live in the present without fear, more fully and alive now.

Beethoven:  “Music is a higher revelation.”