Advocacy resources: U.N. conference and music organizations promote music's benefits. (Music in the Community).(United Nations)(Brief Article)

From the United Nations to the local school board, law- and policymakers are heeding the advocacy message of music teachers and related experts in the field.

Several of the world's leading authorities on music and wellness addressed a U.N. conference on December 6, 2001, to advance the study and use of music making as a tool for wellness around the globe.

"Each culture has rhythm, which with today's knowledge can improve the quality of life and become a medical tool in developing countries," said Conference Coordinator Dianne Davis, founding president of the International Council for Caring Communities, one of the event's sponsors.

"Music is a universal, innate language; you are born with it," noted Conference Chair Dr. Matthew Lee, Howard A. Rusk Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University (NYU) School of Medicine and adjunct professor of music and music education at NYU. "It is not acquired like language. It has no national boundaries. Your body is composed of a box of rhythms: cardiac, sleeping, endocrine, menstrual, movements, etc. When these rhythms are altered, you have illness or disease."

Before the assembled experts and U.N. delegates began the four-hour conference, actress, singer and arts advocate Kitty Carlisle Hart greeted conference participants at a special luncheon addressed by Andre Erdos, the U.N. Ambassador from the Republic of Hungary, who discussed music and diplomacy.

The conference, titled "Music, Culture, Technology and Healthcare," was funded by the American Music Conference (AMC) and sponsored by the International Council for Caring Communities and the Rusk Institute as part of the United Nations "Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations 2001."

Several presentations included direct calls to action. Neurologist and author Dr. Barry Bittman proposed a series of U.N. resolutions that would recognize music making as "an inalienable right of all people worldwide" and to add music to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.