Carnegie Hall, the New York concert venue that opened in 1891, has been known to experiment with the environment of its concerts. Beginning in 2023, the venue started hosting a concert series that encouraged relaxation, mindfulness, and well-being.
Carnegie Hall’s Well-Being Concerts allow attendees to relax on mats in whatever position is most comfortable while listening to the performer.
“This concert series comes out of 15 years of concerts that were presented by Carnegie Hall in many different community settings, many different environments including health care settings, schools, correctional and justice settings and others,” said Manuel Bagorro of Carnegie Hall, an organizer of the events. “What we learned during all of those concerts over many years is that there were well-being health benefits that were connected with these concert experiences that connected to the anticipation before the concert, to the experience of the concert itself and the ripple effects out of the experience.”
Coming out of the pandemic, Bagorro explained, Carnegie Hall wanted to apply the knowledge and experience from these concerts to create concerts designed to contribute to well-being.
“We thought about the way that people sat at a concert,” Bagorro said. “There are floor mats and there are floor cushions. The performers are in the center of the room surrounded by the audience on the same level. There is a lighting design that creates an immersive environment and there’s a host that leads people through a mindfulness practice exercise and checks in, in the middle, and does a reflection at the end.”
Dr. Matthew Steinfeld, a clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, is among the hosts of the Well-Being Concerts.
“The host serves as a guide for the experience,” Dr. Steinfeld said. “They set a narrative framework that is more than just introducing the concert and in my case, part of what I do is write a guided meditation or guided imagery script that is interwoven throughout the concert and the function is to tell the story of who the audience members are to one another in that setting, to affirm people’s interdependence that we fundamentally matter to one another…”
Mindfulness, Dr. Steinfeld said, at its root is about how the mind stays with what it’s perceiving, a challenge in a modern culture full of distractions.
“One of the sources of suffering in our society has to do with the presence and the causes of those disconnects,” Dr. Steinfeld said.
Music, Dr. Steinfeld added, is a wonderful technology for helping people feel their emotions with themselves and one another.
Another unique aspect of the Well-Being Concerts is that the audience doesn’t applaud until the very end, and where attendees are encouraged to wish each other well and begin conversations about how they’re feeling.
“That changes the relationship between the audience and the artist,” Bagorro said. “It feels like more of an expanded journey in a really beautiful way.”
Among this season’s performers was Nathalie Joachim, a performer and composer nominated for her landmark project, Famn d’Ayiti, an evening-length work for flute, voice, string quartet and electronics that celebrates and explores her Haitian heritage.
“It was, I think, equally as restorative for me, as it was, hopefully, for the audience,” Joachim said. “Music, as a form of therapy or healing or meditation, is, I think, a deep part of the origins of music and why we have been making music as long as there’s been people around. To come together with other people in that way and to have people be able to feel relaxed in an environment that often can feel formal… It was really great and allowed us to have a more communal experience together.”
For days afterward, Joachim said she felt blissful and internally calm.
“I think people respond very differently in a room that is not constructed with great formality,” Bagorro said. “So the fact that people are taking off their shoes and are lying on the ground immediately changes the atmosphere”
The next Well-Being Concert, featuring the Anat Cohen Quartetinho, is taking place at the Resnick Education Wing at 5 p.m. on April 14.
The 2024-2025 Well-Being Concert series will be announced later this spring.
Visit www.carnegiehall.org/Events/Well-Being-Concerts for more information.
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