Part songwriting workshop, and part guided-research practice, the Songwrights’ Apothecary Lab (SAL), provides a structure for the collaborative development of new compositions designed to offer enhanced therapeutic benefit to listeners/participants.
Musicians, music students, arts-based therapeutic practitioners, and students in related fields gather to research and collaborate in the creation of new/original music devised to offer therapeutic benefit. Each step of our process will be supported and witnessed by experienced practitioners working at the intersection of various medical and therapeutic fields (ex: neuroscience, music therapy, psychology, public health, etc.) and music.
Our Summer 2025 iteration of the Songwrights Apothecary Lab is taking shape as a 6 week course offered through UCLA. In partnership with the UCLA CDU Dana Center and The Music Center, the course will reinforce community connections and place-based relevance of the work particularly in weeks 5 and 6 of this course during which the broader South LA community will merge with the UCLA cohort of students and academics.
The UCLA CDU Dana Center is an interdisciplinary initiative that reimagines the connection between neuroscience and local communities. Our mission is to create a practice of neuroscience research shaping education, inquiry, and systems change that prioritizes the wisdom and experience of local communities.
Through our budding research initiative—the CoLab for the Healing Arts in Medicine—we aim to transform noise into music and music into healing. We are exploring the profound impact of sound on the psyche, replacing the cacophony of traffic, helicopters, and arguments with personal expression, meditation, and rejuvenation. Together, we aim to discover how music can heal, foster growth, and regenerate our local communities.
The UCLA CDU Dana Center is proud to have worked with Los Angeles’ celebrated Music Center to sponsor the Songwrights Apothecary Lab. This groundbreaking course serves as an inaugural example of the types of work we aim to collaborate on with artists like esperanza spalding, who recognize the power in the music they produce, and embrace conducting it in nontraditional spaces.
In this hands-on, community-engaged course, expect to learn via repeated practice how to craft and research collaboratively across therapeutic and music disciplines, and create music with enhanced therapeutic potential/application. This course also emphasizes and leads participants through developing multi-modal forms of evaluating recipient/patient/listener experience.
