Healing HarmonY 🎵
by Sabrina Liu, 2024
Flip through some of my own compositions for HTF's monthly virtual piano lessons:
It began with a question that hovered in the silence between video chats—do they feel forgotten?
Over time, I have watched the Tibetan children whom HTF supports grow into teenagers (as I myself grow into a young adult), their questions deepening, their laughter occasionally edged with something heavier. During my annual visits to the villages and HTF’s bimonthly video calls, I started noticing a quiet anxiety in some of their voices. A restlessness. They spoke, gently but honestly, of a loneliness I could recognize from my four years of hotline work—one not born from geography, but from the quiet ache of being overlooked by the world.
Their words haunted me long after I returned home. And so I did what I always do when I feel lost: I turned to music.
Music has long been my language. I have seen and effectuated its transformative power in hospital rooms and prison cafeterias—how it stirs memories in Alzheimer’s patients, softens tired expressions in veterans, reminds incarcerated individuals of the outside world, and steadies trembling fingers in those who had lost too much. From the therapeutic concerts hosted by my student organization Music Media, I have researched and come to understand the growing science behind music wellness. Studies point to the regulation of cortisol levels, activation of dopamine pathways, and engagement of the limbic system—music literally tuning the brain toward calm. If such profound change could occur through song, I thought, why not in the mountains of Tibet?
In July of 2024, I launched Helping Tibet Foundation’s new undertaking—our monthly virtual piano lessons. Every session, five new Tibetan teenagers gather around one shared phone in their village hall. It’s often the only device (from one of their parents) with signal strong enough to reach me via video chat. On their end, they sit by the donated, 88-key Casio keyboard that HTF shipped across the world—a brand new, sleek instrument which I had first furnished with Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do stickers before sending. On my end, I sit by an ancient piano in one of my college’s many, ungoverned practice rooms.
I never begin with “Twinkle, Twinkle” or “Chopsticks.” American beginner songs like “The Star-Spangled Banner” don’t resonate here. Instead, I compose new pieces—slow, intentional melodies shaped by the voices of health workers and caregivers, written to mirror the rhythm of breath, the rise and fall of the heart under strain.
I build progressively intensifying levels into each composition, so that students have something to reach for in the weeks between our lessons. All the while, I garner professional feedback from the facilities’ activity directors and rehabilitation therapists with whom I collaborate in years-long partnerships for Music Media, and teach myself how to use Musescore, a digital notation and composition program.
And so they reached. With joy. With discipline. With hope.
They call me “Sister Teacher.” I laugh every time they say it—it’s both affectionate and oddly formal, and it reminds me of how they’re still children in many ways (just like me), even as they shoulder so much. What they don’t know is how much they’ve taught me. Their willingness to try something new, their openness to being vulnerable through music, continues to fuel my belief in what nontraditional healthcare can do.
Today, HTF’s music wellness project is expanding to Shanka Orphanage, which we began supporting just last year. And I dream beyond that. These piano lessons are not just a form of education—they are therapy, support, resilience. They are the beginnings of what I hope to research and build: arts-based interventions as legitimate, powerful tools in neurotherapeutic treatments, particularly for those who are so often left out of research, funding, and innovation. Alas, a testament to next-generation intersections.
My work with HTF—and especially with these monthly lessons—has shown me that healing doesn’t always come in the form of medicine. Sometimes, it comes in the form of a single sustained note, echoing gently through a village nestled in the clouds.
