Music and the Medical Humanities
Friday 27 February 2026, 3pm - 4.30pm
Seminar Room 63, Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities
All Welcome
Speakers: Peter Shannon, Hester Crombie
Situated within the health humanities, this presentation explores ways in which music engages with health, illness, and wellbeing. It begins by highlighting research and practice in healthcare and arts-in-health contexts, where music supports patients and caregivers by reducing pain and anxiety, regulating emotion, and fostering connection.
It then turns to musicology, which has long examined illness, suffering, and psychological distress through composers’ biographies. While this scholarship provides rich aesthetic and historical insight, it has largely remained on the periphery of the health humanities, seldom extending to questions of care or lived experience.
Finally, it explores how lived experience could be used to influence the treatment of patients, through music and sound, to reduce trauma and improve patient outcomes.
Panelists:
Peter Shannon is an orchestral conductor and interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of music, medicine, and the health humanities. Over the past 15 years in the United States, he has led professional orchestras as artistic director and conductor and founded the American Institute for Music and Healing, developing music-based programs for hospitals, cancer centres, and healthcare professionals. He has served as a Visiting Instructor in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University and is currently Affiliate Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities at Mercer University School of Medicine and a Visiting Scholar at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Hester Crombie is a musician and sound artist specialising in collaborative piano with a long standing love of Schubert’s chamber music and songs, and having experienced several early pregnancy complications, Hester is also a patient tutor for the Nuffield Department of Women’s and Reproductive Health. A graduate of University College, Oxford and the Royal Academy of Music, Hester now lives in Oxford, where she is in great demand as a pianist and teacher, and draws the local pigeons. Her composition Please Hold follows the excruciating journey of a parent’s experience navigating the John Radcliffe Hospital’s automated switchboard. You can follow her work @musicintheshed.
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Medical Humanities Research Hub, TORCH Research Hubs
