Five-time Grammy Award-winning legendary opera singer Renée Fleming has released a new book, “Music & Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health & Wellness.”
WTOP’s Jason Fraley interviews Renée Fleming about her new book and the Kennedy Center Honors (Part 1)
She was among the graduates of the most recent class to receive the Kennedy Center Honors last December.
Now five-time Grammy Award-winning opera legend Renée Fleming has released a new book, Music & Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health & Wellness.
“This is a beautiful testament to the power of art for health and wellness,” Fleming told WTOP.
“I felt like an advocate and cheerleader and wanted to share the work with the public. I thought an anthology would be a good way to have 41 different people share their work: researchers, creative arts therapists, artists, and major institutions like the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and the National Institutes of Health.”
Fleming launched the first sustained collaboration to find the intersection of arts, health, and neuroscience between the Kennedy Center, America’s national cultural center, and the National Institutes of Health, the largest health research organization in the U.S. The foreword is written by Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the NIH.
“NIH has a few different institutes, and one of them, Integrative Medicine, is really key to this work,” Fleming said.
“Readers can choose their own topic: child development and education, different therapeutic applications, the future. There’s a great futuristic chapter about what this could be like in the future. … It’s mostly music, because that’s where I live, but there’s also architecture, theater and visual arts.”
She also created a touring program of the same name, Music and the Mind, which has performed in over 50 cities around the world and won Research America’s Rosenfeld Prize for Influence on Public Opinion. In 2020, Fleming launched a weekly web show, Music and the Mind Live, which has been viewed 700,000 times from 70 countries.
She also currently serves as an advisor to leading efforts in the field, including the Sound Health Network at University of California, San Francisco, and NeuroArts Blueprint at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
“[The arts help] “This can be due to mental health, pain, movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis, but also traumatic brain injury and stroke,” Mr Fleming said.
“When kids are engaged, they do better in school and their brains change in just two years. … One thing that has changed is technology; anyone can measure this now. I’ve done fMRI experiments myself at NIH, so we’ll have enough evidence and rigorous research to incorporate this into medicine.”
Few artists are more credible in the artistic realm than Fleming, whose Hollywood credits include the soundtracks for Oscar-winning films The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) and The Shape of Water (2017), and whose Broadway credits include a Tony Award nomination for Carousel (2018).
In 2012, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama, and in 2014, she became the first classical music artist to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl.
She has performed at the Nobel Peace Prize and Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee at Buckingham Palace, and most recently, the World Health Organization appointed her as their Goodwill Ambassador for Arts and Health for 2023.
Last year, her Grammy-winning album, “Voice of Nature: the Anthropocene,” inspired a National Geographic climate change film, which she has toured and screened in recitals.
In March, she starred as Pat Nixon in the Opéra de Perle’s new production of “Nixon in China,” and in May of this year she returned to the Metropolitan Opera in “The Hours,” based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Academy Award-winning film.
Of all the accolades she has received, none will surpass her receiving the Kennedy Center Honors in 2023, where she will sit in the balcony with fellow recipients Billy Crystal, Queen Latifah, Dionne Warwick and Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees.
“It’s unbelievable, there’s really nothing comparable,” Fleming said.
“It was an intimidating yet amazing experience to be onstage. … Billy Crystal was overwhelmed by the experience and remained humble throughout the weekend. Queen Latifah was amazing and I fell in love with her family. They were all great people. Dionne Warwick was an idol and I enjoyed talking to her. … I was surprised to see Sigourney Weaver, Christine Baranski and Tituss Burgess in the tribute. It was amazing.”
WTOP’s Jason Fraley interviews Renée Fleming about her new book and the Kennedy Center Honors (Part 2)
Listen to our full conversation in the podcast below:
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