WATERTOWN — The late Dr. Aram Chobanian, a noted cardiologist, academician and modern-day renaissance man, received a worthy tribute on May 15 at a program organized by the Armenian American Medical Association (AAMA) of Boston at the Mosesian Center for the Arts. The program, titled the inaugural “Aram V. Chobanian Medicine and Humanities Program,” honored the lecture series’ namesake, by exploring the humanities and the arts and their role in medicine.
To sum up the late Chobanian’s list of accomplishments is not easy. He was a part of the fabric of Boston University, serving in many positions until in 2022, thanks to the generosity of his childhood friend, Edward Avedisian, his name and that of his friend became part of the name of the medical school.
In addition, he was active in trying to bring American standards of medical education to Armenia, through his work with the Fund for Armenian Relief.
As dedicated to music as medicine, he encouraged medical students to partake of music and was a longtime member of the Friends of Armenian Culture Society which has helped organize the Armenian Night at Pops.
He died in 2023 at the age of 94.
Tribute to a Mentor
The program was opened by Dr. Armineh Mirzabegian, AAMA board advisor, and Dr. Hovig Chitilian, president of the AAMA Executive Committee.
In her opening remarks, Mirzabegian, the AAMA’s Medicine and Humanities Committee Chair, paid tribute to the artistic nature of Chobanian, a co-founder of the AAMA, which had enriched his medical practice.
“Inspired by his insight and wisdom, we continue his legacy by renaming our lecture series at the intersection of arts and medicine in Dr. Chobanian’s honor,” Mirzabegian said.
Chitilian spoke about the AAMA and its goals moving forward.
Next, Dr. Richard Babayan offered a brief introduction of Chobanian, and with a quivering voice, called him his mentor long before he became a colleague at Boston University.
In 1973, he said, Chobanian established the Cardiovascular Institute at BU, “the first of its kind, that connected hypertension and cardiovascular disease. His research and his work worldwide in hypertension is at the top rung of medical research,” he said.
“He was a mentor, colleague and friend. He was an amazing physician … at the top rung of medical research,” he said, noting that he had done groundbreaking work in the field of cardiovascular health.
“He would be very proud of the program that is being presented tonight. He would be honored that the sum of his passions is presented to you all this evening,’” Babayan said.
Babayan noted that Chobanian had been named the dean of the Boston University school of Medicine in 1988, before being named in 2003 as the acting head of the entire university when it was experiencing a turbulent period.
Of course, later, he would leave an even bigger mark when the BU medical school would be renamed the Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine in 2022.
Bree Carriglio, the executive director of the Fund for Armenian Relief, an organization with which Chobanian had collaborated for directing help to Armenia, also spoke. She paid tribute to his legacy with FAR, which led to a “new generation of Armenian physicians” and massive improvements in the healthcare system of the country by helping to better train physicians there.
Music Teacher
Justin Casinghino, assistant professor of music at Fitchburg State and lecturer of composition and theory at Boston University, was in a different position than many during the program, as he was Chobanian’s teacher rather than student; he had taught Chobanian music composition for several years, starting when the latter was in his 80s.
When the late Chobanian had approached him for lessons, he had asked Casinghino to help him arrange an opera. However, Casinghino had refused, suggesting to him instead, “I’m not going to write arrangements for you, but I will teach you how to do write your own music,” he said. “That’s when our relationship started to blossom, when I gave him that challenge. … We ended up working together for 12 years and I know that the study of music had a significant impact on his life. He told me regularly.”
“Aram wrote reasonably tonal music,” he said. “Trying something new at that age was exciting for him and was certainly inspiring for me.”
Chobanian was often composing pieces for his wife, Jasmine. When she passed away in 2014, he began delving more deeply into music, Casinghino said, to deal with the grief. “It was a void that you only have when you have a Jasmine in your life. And I know it helped him because he would talk about it,” he said.
Chobanian wrote several operas and hired students from Boston University to sing them. Among the subjects he picked for operas were Isabella Stewart Gardner, Tom Jones and Enrico Caruso.
One of his compositions, for string quartet, was performed on May 15, with Haig Hovsepian on violin, June Chung on violin, Cara Pogossian on viola and Dilshod Narzillaev on cello.
Later in the program, the quartet, led by Hovsepian, performed several pieces from Komitas, with the visual accompaniment of Kevork Mourad, who painted traditional scenes while the musicians performed. The drawings were available for sale afterwards.
Music and the Brain
The keynote speaker for the evening was Tufts University psychology professor, Aniruddh Patel, who detailed the link between music and the brain. In a talk that was both accessible to a lay audience and inspiring, he showed examples of the power of music and the physical changes it makes to the brain.
Patel is a cognitive psychologist known for his research on music cognition and the cognitive neuroscience of music. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 to support his work on the evolution of musical cognition.
He is also the author of the 2008 book, Music, Language, and the Brain, and contributed a chapter in the 2024 book edited by opera star Renee Fleming, Music and the Mind.
In his talk, titled “Music, Emotion and Brain Health,” Patel explained that since his undergraduate days at Harvard, he had wanted to combine the studies of music and science, to see its effects on a healthy living brain. However, in the late 1980s, science had not yet devised a way to see a living brain respond to music.
“Fast forward from then to now and I just cannot believe how the field has changed,” he said. “There is now enough research on music and brain and health that there is a website called the https://soundhealth.ucsf.edu/ that tries to share the research with the general public.”
“We are all familiar with how music can deeply touch our emotions,” he explained, further asking, “That’s wonderful and very powerful in the moment but what lasting effects can music have on neurological functions on our brains?”
Language, movement and memories, he showed, are all affected by music.
He went on to discuss how people who have had strokes and cannot get sentences out, are helped by music when there is no medical cure for it. “Yet, some patients can sing fluently. So fluently you wouldn’t know anything was wrong with them,” he said, which leads to the question whether singing and speaking are controlled in different regions of the brain.
Patel has conducted research in the archives of the Veterans’ Health Administration (VA) Hospital in Boston and realized that for many years, people had pondered the spaces for singing versus talking in the brain and suggested music therapy of one form or another.
“They are largely separate but there is enough overlap that maybe we can use music to recover brain function,” he said. “That’s exactly what was done at the VA Hospital.”
That kind of research eventually led to with Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT), where a patient would sometimes be able to sing a sentence rather than speak it.
“This turned out to have some efficiency with some patients,” he said. “We were able to go back and look with brain imaging. We saw changes in important structural pathways in the brain that connect the auditory and temporal regions.”
He showed a very touching video from a group called Sing Well, which puts together choirs to help “people with communications disorders to sing together in groups so that way it helps their communication and benefits them socially.”
In a short video, participants included people with strokes or Parkinson’s, who clearly blossomed in choirs.
Patel is spearheading the OPERA hypothesis, which posits that musical training enhances the neural encoding of speech. According to the theory, the precision demands music places on the neural system, in addition to the emotions that music engage and repetition, all can improve speech in those who need it. “When you have all of those, the prediction is musical training can benefit speech processing,” he explained.
Another major related area benefitted by music is movement, namely dance or understanding the beat, which is instinctive, Patel said.
“When people in a brain scan are listening to music, or a rhythm that has beat, if you look at their brain, you see activity not just in the hearing centers, but very strong activity in their motor planning regions. These people aren’t moving or going to move, so what is going on,” he asked. “We think this has to do with the predicting of the timing of the next beat.”
This research can benefit with Parkinson’s patients. “Some patients with Parkinson’s can move much better when there is music on with a beat. It kind of releases them from their freezing status and makes them move more fluidly.”
Again, a brief clip from the movie “Capturing Grace” showed this theory in action. In one clip, a woman who seemed rooted to the spot, unable to take a step, was able to do so after upbeat music started to play.
He advocated for more research in medical schools to see how this can be advanced.
He next addressed issues with memory.
“Music has a deep connection to memory. That is why the ancient epics like The Iliad or Bhagavad Gita were chanted or sung. That’s how they were passed on from generation to generation,” he said.
Memory is created in the hippocampus region of the brain. “Music must be interacting in that system in a very powerful way,” he explained. He and a colleague at Tufts, Prof. Elizabeth Race, are working on experiments showing the tie, by “playing music with a beat and we just show pictures every once in a while,” as part of a memory test, he said. “People remember pictures that appear on the beat better than those that were off the beat.”
They are now extending it toward Parkinson’s’ research.
The bottom line, he said, was that incorporating music in any way in one’s life — listening, practicing, learning, dancing — improves one’s brain.
“Just regular engagement with music as an amateur, singing in a choir, learning an instrument informally for pleasure, can benefit cognitive reserve [Cognitive reserve refers to the brain’s ability to withstand and compensate for damage or decline in brain function.] in the brain and make the brain age in a healthy way. It’s a way we can protect our brains by doing something that feels good,” he concluded.
Award to Tachdjian
Later in the program, Doctors Gail Guzelian and Armen Arslanian presented Dr. Raffi Tachdjian with the “Aram V. Chobanian Medicine and Humanities Award” for his work integrating music with the care of young cancer victims.
Tachdjian is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics in the Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Tachdjian had founded the Children’s Music Fund in 2002 after as an intern, he met a young patient with bone cancer at Mass General Hospital. “That is the torch I carry to this day to continue to bring musical instruments and music therapy to any kid that needs it,” he said during a short video showing the work the foundation conducts with young patients.
Music, he said, can relieve the anxiety anticipating procedures.
“Music makes all of life’s senses pop for me,” he said in the short film.
“Thirty years ago, almost to the month, I got to meet Dr. Chobanian at the Boston-based Armenian Medical World Congress in 1995,” he said when accepting his award. “He was an inspiring, humanistic visionary individual, but he was all about the collective,” he added. He thanked his many mentors in the audience.
“It’s just astounding that Dr. Chobanian, at his mature age, got to learn with you and you both learned from each other and made the world a better learning place,” he said.
“This award embodies the collective. In accepting this award, I say keep spreading music, keep spreading the humanity and in his honor, keep spreading Aram,” Tachdjian said.
