Swan Songs Portland has a simple but powerful mission: to provide free, intimate concerts for people at the end of their lives and pay local musicians to perform them. The nonprofit fulfilled its first concert request last autumn when it hired a mariachi band to play for a person terminally ill with cancer, surrounded by her friends and family. It is the first affiliate of Swan Songs, which was founded in Austin, Texas, 20 years ago.
Currently serving Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties, Swan Songs Portland has a list of nearly 50 musicians — and growing — it can call on short notice to perform an array of requested musical styles, from Beethoven to Bob Dylan-esque folk and rock. Jim Friscia is Swan Songs Portland’s board president and concert planner. Karyn Thurston is a musician and board member who performs with her partner, Ben Grace, in the folk music duo Story & Tune. They join us along with Terri Burton, who had requested a concert for her dying mother that Grace performed earlier this year.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Swan Songs Portland has a simple but powerful mission to provide free, intimate concerts for people who are at the end of their lives. The nonprofit fulfilled its first concert request last fall when it hired a mariachi band to play a tiny concert. The only people in the audience, a woman who was terminally ill and a small group of her friends and family. The nonprofit has now put on about a dozen concerts around the Portland area.
In a few minutes we’ll hear from some of the musicians who’ve been taking part in this program, along with a family member of someone who was given a concert. We start with Jim Friscia. He is the board president and a concert planner for Swan Songs Portland. It’s great to have you on the show.
Jim Friscia: Thanks, Dave. Appreciate being here.
Miller: How did you decide to start Swan Song PDX?
Friscia: Swan Songs Portland began as an offshoot of Swan Songs in Austin, Texas. I happened to make a connection with them in Austin through a good friend who lived down there. [I] met the founder, Christine Albert, who is a musician, and played for some folks who were nearing the end of life and felt a mission to continue to do that.
This was 30 years ago. About 20 years ago, she and a couple of other folks formed a nonprofit down there called Swan Songs. And in 2016, I met her and we talked about how Portland might be a good place if they ever wanted to expand. They were not doing this anywhere else. So we talked about it for a few years. 2019, we were actually looking to get things started here, then a pandemic hit and that kind of put things on hold.
Miller: Not a great time to have people all gathering together in a bedroom when someone is dying.
Friscia: Exactly. So they had to pivot. They managed to survive because they went to doing concerts either recorded for people or via Zoom, but then began again to do concerts in homes and in hospices. They ended up also rethinking how they wanted to do the model and we became what’s called a community affiliate. We started as a community affiliate, we’re our own nonprofit. We connected with them about a year-and-a-half ago. We got incorporated and put a board together about a little over a year ago, and here we are. We started offering music to people last fall.
Miller: Did you have any of your own personal experiences that made you want to do this? You mentioned talking to someone earlier who was doing this in Austin, but what about for yourself?
Friscia: Yes. For me, I immediately got what they were doing because about 20 years ago I had a friend who was in hospice care up at Hopewell House, here in Portland. And I arranged a concert with one of her favorite Portland musicians.
Miller: You did a version of this yourself 20 years ago?
Friscia: Yeah. So he came, and we gathered about 20 friends and family members on the patio at Hopewell House. It was a tremendously moving experience, it was something that stuck with everybody who was there.
Fast forward 11 years, almost a dozen years later, I had this conversation with Christine and it was like, I get what you’re doing. I might be ready in a few years to help put something together.
Miller: How does it work?
Friscia: Well, the way it generally works is that we have a website tool, so people go and they can fill out a form to request a concert. Generally, those come through hospice organizations. So the key for us is having relationships with hospice organizations. That’s how they built it in Austin. Hospice social workers, chaplains or nurses will let folks know that this is a service that’s available. Then they go to the website and either the family member or the hospice rep will fill out the form.
That’ll come to me. I will then contact the family, the person who made the request and get more information so that I can connect musicians who can play the requested music, because this is free for them. This is by request the style that they want, the style of music they want, the instrumentation they might want, the songs they might want, because this is for them. We want to fulfill musical last wishes. That’s how we see it.
Miller: Jim, I want to hear more from you. As I mentioned, Jim Friscia is a board president of the nonprofit Swan Songs Portland, which organizes free small concerts for people at the end of their lives. But I also want to introduce more people into this conversation.
Karyn Thurston is a musician and a board member of the nonprofit. She performs with her partner, Ben Grace, in the folk music duo Story & Tune. They’ve performed two of these concerts, including one that was requested by another of our guests now, Terri Burton, when her mother was in hospice just a few months ago.
Karyn, Ben and Terri, welcome to the show.
Karyn Thurston: Hi, thanks so much for having us.
Miller: Karyn, how did you decide you wanted to take part in this as a musician?
Thurston: Sure. I saw the advertisement come through, we are part of the MusicPortland group that’s here in the city. We love the work they do. And they had put out a call for musicians on behalf of Swan Songs who would be interested in participating. And Ben and I have always done music in more intimate contexts. We play bars, we play restaurants, we play shows, but we also love to play retirement and assisted living facilities or house concerts.
We love that work. There’s something really, when you do music for a living, you can get lost in the grind and the hustle. Shows like this where you’re in a setting with someone, and it’s just about being present and there with the person that you’re with, and doing something that’s about human connection, that really helps us ground and remember why we love to do this in the first place. So we jumped right in, we were super excited.
Miller: You know, Ben, as Karyn was saying that, I was reminded that I was in a memory care facility just two weeks ago for a couple of days, visiting somebody. One day there was a movie that was playing and a lot of the residents, some of them, seemed to be paying a little bit of attention. It wasn’t clear how much they cared about what was on the screen. The next day, there was a pianist and a singer, both great musicians, and the residents there … the level of attention was very different. I imagine that goes along with what Karyn was saying. Why did you want to take part in this project?
Ben Grace: One of my grandfathers suffered from dementia and reverted back to a version of himself that was before any of the family had ever met him, when he was a young teenager playing football in Australia. And his life’s work, which was the Bible and these holy scriptures, completely disappeared from his memory. He had no memory at all of that anymore. So I think it was a very fascinating thing to me that music can help us uncover these parts of itself. Like you say with a memory care facility, sometimes people who are completely non-responsive will start to sing.
Miller: The music stays.
Grace: The music stays. We still don’t know all the science behind our brains and why music is different from language. But, it is a fascinating thing. And I do think that we get to be involved with these really holy and sacred moments with people, and help them to pass on to what is next. And also, I think, give the family and the friends some comfort and some peace knowing that their loved one is seen and held.
Miller: Terri Burton, my understanding is that you asked for music to be played for your mother and Ben is the piano player who did that. Before we hear some of the music that Ben did play, can you tell us a little bit about your mom?
Terri Burton: Well, I found out about the Swan Songs through Housecall Providers – that is a hospice. I didn’t know it even existed. And I can tell you about my mom: she was a very eccentric, fun … Everything that she ever did had to have music and it was anything from having a high school band come down the street for one of my dad’s birthdays to …
Miller: She hired a high school band to do like a parade just for your dad?
Burton: Right. A neighborhood parade with a boombox, with John Philip Sousa on it, classical music playing in her home at all times, player piano with everything you could think of. She even got a music roll for me, “What’s It All About Alfie,” one of my favorite songs. And she also was a writer and a poet. She was a voracious reader. She had 4,000 books and she’d read every one of them.
She was the president of Sherlock Holmes Society and she had a whole collection of costumes, Victorian and otherwise. She costumed anybody and everybody. Just very fun-loving and very complex. She was a young mother. She had me just barely when she was 18. Her first grandchild was born when she was 45 and she wanted to be called Granny. [Laughs]
Miller: I get the sense you could go on, but I’m curious about how you figured out what you wanted in terms of the music. You described a lot of different musical styles and a very rich life full of music. But for this particular concert, when she was nearing her final weeks or months in hospice, what did you say you wanted for her and how aware was she of the concert that was being planned?
Burton: I knew we wanted to have someone play Chopin because she had filled out this book about what she wanted at her funeral. She was a party organizer, even her own funeral. And she said that she wanted Chopin played at her funeral, so we knew that that was what we wanted. And she loves the piano. She even tried to teach herself how to play the piano when we were kids. We did talk to her about it and she was open to it. We were very happy that we had it because it was not only for my mom but for our family. We didn’t really realize that.
Miller: Ben, can we hear the Chopin piece, one of them that you played for this concert?
Grace: Yes, sure.
Miller: What is this?
Grace: This is Prelude in E Minor, Opus 28 No. 4.
[Ben Grace playing Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor, Opus 28 No. 4 on piano]
Miller: That’s Ben Grace playing the Chopin Prelude in E minor, which he played for a concert organized by Terri Burton for her mother when she was in hospice. Terri, what do you most remember from that day?
Burton: Well, I have tears in my eyes right now. I think the thing that our family didn’t realize is that this was a way to say goodbye without having to use the words. And then even when my mother started kind of getting a little impatient because she didn’t feel well, we didn’t want it to end.
Miller: That seems like a hard moment to navigate.
Burton: So the nice thing was is that the whole family was together, but we didn’t have to say anything and we could just have that together feeling. And like I said, I have tears in my eyes right now because it really was wonderful.
Miller: Jim?
Friscia: Yeah, I was gonna say that fostering that sense of connection among the family members, connecting to something that is totally heart, I think that is one of the most important things about a Swan Song’s concert. I mean, the thing that it can do for the recipient and their loved ones. I think everybody feels it when they’re there.
Miller: Could we hear one more song, a duet, Karyn, that you and Ben have played at one of these concerts?
Thurston: Sure.
Miller: And if you remember anything about the context of the concert that you want to share?
Thurston: Sure, yeah, Ben and I were invited to go in and play a concert for a wonderful woman who was right at the end and her daughter. It was just the two of them, the two of us, Jim and our facilitator there. And again, just the beautiful connection that’s created in these places. We live in a world that’s so increasingly disconnected. And to be able to come into this sacred space and just sing to each other, she would sing along some of the time, and other times she would just close her eyes and listen.
Miller: But it’s even amazing just to think of this as a concert. It’s two people making music for two people.
Thurston: Yeah.
Miller: That’s what this was.
Thurston: It’s just showing up, being present with someone and saying, “Hey, we see you, we honor you and the life that you’ve lived so far, and we believe that you are worth someone coming and singing to you. This is the least you deserve.”
Grace: I also think that this is the way music has always been. We forget because we have TV and we think of a concert now as a big U2 in the Sphere. But we used to sit around our parlors and play songs to each other after dinner. This is the way we would entertain each other, it’s the way we’d pass on stories. So I think this is really getting back to what music always was.
Thurston: Yeah, and this song we’re going to play is “Always,” which is by Irving Berlin, [and] was actually my grandmother’s favorite song.
Miller: So let’s have a listen.
[Story & Tune playing “Always” by Irving Berlin – piano music and singing]
Miller: That is the folk music duo Story & Tune. They are Ben Grace and Karyn Thurston. That is a song they performed as part of one of the super intimate concerts put together by Swan Songs Portland. Jim Friscia is the board president and a concert planner for this nonprofit. Terri Burton is the daughter of Betty Hale, a Swan Songs Portland concert recipient from earlier this year.
Thanks so much to all four of you for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
Thurston: Thank you.
Burton: Thank you so much.
Grace: Thank you, Dave.
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