BY JOEL HARTE

A music therapy program at the Peterborough Senior Center is helping seniors rediscover their inner divas. Since October, a group of students at the Berklee College of Music has been running sing-alongs at the center, giving the seniors a new way to connect with each other and with the outside world.

“There is something about music and older people that affects them more than talking,” said Penina Adelman, director of the Peterborough Senior Center, located on Jersey Street in the West Fens. “You can see their facial expressions change.” The Berklee students come to the center once a week, and pass out shakers, maracas and other instruments to the seniors. They run through a song first to get the group warmed up, and then the singing begins.

Gloria Platt, a senior at the center who is a self-professed lover of “the schmaltzy stuff,” said the seniors usually sing classics that are well known, such as “Puff the Magic Dragon.” When asked about the popularity of the program, Platt said, “To be perfectly frank… it’s better attended than 90 percent of the groups.”

The sing-along’s popularity is partly a result of the quality of the music therapy program at Berklee. Students are required to think about music therapy clinically, which means that it is goal-oriented. “A lot of this music therapy stuff is about goals and focusing on abilities, rather than disabilities,” said Eddie Konopsaek, a music therapy major at Berklee. The students are taught to design therapy programs based on their observations of a client’s needs.

Peggy Codding, a Berklee professor in music therapy who runs the sing-alongs at the senior center, defines music therapy as “the use of music to restore, maintain, or enhance quality of life.” To do so, music therapists, who must be approved by the Certification Board for Music Therapists, first assess a client, then evaluate goals and set up a treatment program.

Music isn’t used as a blunt object to beat away any and all problems, however.

We are very much what you call an evidence-based profession,” said Codding, emphasizing that strategies differ widely based on a client’s abilities. For example, a music therapist could assist a stroke victim by helping him or her play a guitar with his or her weak hand, or try to get someone walking again by playing music to help him or her stroll on beat.

While it seems difficult to come up with a new strategy for each client, the students in the program at Berklee are, Codding said, “trained very heavily in improvisation.” They know how to play many instruments, and know many styles of music and the theory behind them. That attention to detail has had real results at the senior center. Certain seniors who were having trouble making friendships have “just come to life during this,” Adelman, the center’s director, said.

One of the reasons for this is that the program is interactive. “Among each other, just playing in a group, they’re forced to stay in the same rhythm, sing the same song,” Adelman said. She said the students who run the program are performers, “but this is focused on the bond between performer and audience.”

The interaction has created at least two fans of the students at the senior center. Platt noticed that people are more upbeat and energetic during and after the sessions, and Adelman said, “There are people for which this is the high point of the week.”

For the students, however, the high points are mixed with lots of hard work. Konopsaek, the Berklee music therapy major, said students learn the science but also have real-world experiences to back it up, which is what makes the Berklee program special.

It’s the singing, however, that gets Platt going. “I couldn’t live life without music. Music is my life,” she said.

Joel Harte is an undergraduate student at the Northeastern University School of Journalism.

This article first appeared in the December 2009 paper edition of the Fenway News.