The topic of music is an interesting one, both for the person who is in care, and for the carer themselves.
Music is something that has a very broad spread. Not everyone likes everything, and that is great as it makes for variety.
I lament a programme that was on radio every week years ago "Family Favourites". The programme, listened to by a wide public, featured requests from families to their loved ones who were in the forces overseas. The range of music we heard on the programme was enormously wide, and I probably learned more about breadth in that programme than anywhere else when I was young.
Yes, there were those "Oh not, not 'Nellie the elephant' moments", but frankly, not that many.
Today, radio stations and TV stations are very much focussed on specific kinds of music and, while I listen to Radio 2 a lot in the car - Jeremy Vine - I generally turn the music down and just listen to the topics discussed.
At Jan's home, with its eclectic mix of carers from all over, music is often put on that seems to me to be inappropriate, either in style or volume. Those with dementia are not necessarily any deafer than the rest of us, but they don't often have the ability to put the volume down [or up] or to ask for that.
The carers there have asked me to create some CDs for Jan to listen to when she is in bed in the evenings, and over the years I have done that. I believe that music can breach even the walls of dementia.
Speaking as a carer, music has a huge effect on me, always has. Perhaps that is the Welsh in me. There is little music produced before 2001 that does not have some resonance because of our time together before that time, and some songs today [Bublé's "Lost", for instance] are almost unbearable emotionally.
river_ said:
Abba is a big hit with a few of the ladies and me
Country music always goes down well.
Classical really dosent work.
Scots country Ceilidh music is great for getting them up dancing.
Abba and country are always on my iPod, along with 200 Sinatra songs.
Classical music, in its own right, has an immense spread from the Middle Ages to the present, so don't write it off entirely, but I agree in the context of a workplace it is probably not ideal