BY JIM HOWE

Some volunteers are bringing live music — and, they hope, a smile — to patients and staff at Upstate University Hospital.

The Music at Upstate group includes strolling violinists and a guitar and vocal duo who play in the lobby at the downtown campus. Some of the performers have known each other since their high school days.

“Everyone is so welcoming and appreciates the music,” says Joshua Rim, a fourth-year medical student from New York City who helped organize the free performances. “We really love playing for patients. We can forget about life for a while.”

Rim plays the violin, as does Christine Ly, a fourth-year MD/PhD student. Also a native of New York City, she and Rim played in the same orchestra while in high school.

Ly says their performances “bring a bit of the outside world to the patients in the hospital, giving them a sense of change and sense of escape.”

She recalled an autumn day where the group played for fun in the Weiskotten Hall courtyard. “While we were just enjoying ourselves, the people listening came up to us and put money in our instrument cases. This meant a lot to me because their random act of kindness showed me that they really supported us and our music. We further relayed their support in us to the patients by donating the $64 we raised to the Upstate Cancer Center.”

Often joining Ly and Rim are violinist Dona Occhipinti, who works at the private firm Welch Allyn, and pianist Ben Craxton, an Upstate graduate who is now a resident physician in family medicine at St. Joseph‘s Hospital Health Center. They sometimes can be heard practicing a mix of classical and other tunes in the early evening around the piano at the Upstate Cancer Center, which has long encouraged music as part of a healing atmosphere.

Sometimes just a couple of them will play together, strolling through the hospital or performing at Café Kubal in the Upstate Golisano Children‘s Hospital.

The music program was organized through Upstate‘s employee health series, Pathway to Wellness.

Rim also recruited the duo of Joe DeRaddo and Benjamin Meath, both third-year medical students. DeRaddo, from Seneca Castle, and Meath, from Clifton Springs, both attended Midlakes High School, outside Geneva.

DeRaddo played trumpet before moving to electric bass guitar. Meath played the drums, including in church, and trombone before teaching himself acoustic guitar in college. Each also played in garage bands in high school.

“We take pop songs and make them kind of ‘coffee-shoppy‘ and acoustic. We‘ll take (songs) like “Wagon Wheel,” “Wonderwall,” some Jackson Five and John Mayer and give a kind of easy-listening feel to it — definitely things you could hum along to,” DeRaddo says. Meath does the lead vocals, with DeRaddo doing harmonies.

The two have done some open-mic performing at the Campus Activities Building in addition to playing at the hospital.

“It‘s just fun to be able to do what we enjoy in that kind of a setting,” Meath says. “A lot of people would give us a thumbs-up and crack a smile, and it was nice to be where we work and go to class every day and see other people, see some fun, some joy in other people‘s lives. It‘s a nice alternative to the rigors of medical school.”

DeRaddo agrees. “Music is definitely a way we can escape and ground ourselves every once in a while, and get out of the books.”

This article appears in the spring 2018 issue of Upstate Health magazine.