Artist Profiles

Dr. Joy Berger

// Author, Educator & Musician

DR. JOY BERGER is an author, chaplain, educator, musician, and music therapist from Louisville, Kentucky. Her book “Music Of The Soul: Composing Life Out Of Loss” (2006) is available from Routledge. Her doctoral dissertation was “Music As A Catalyst For Pastoral Care Within The Remembering Tasks Of Grief” (1993), proposing a clinical model for sensitive musical interventions through different seasons of grief. Dr. Joy Berger is the Administrative Director for the Education and Volunteer Center of Hosparus, a regional hospice serving twenty-three counties, and a clinical faculty member for the Music Therapy Department, School of Music, University of Louisville, Kentucky.

Websites: www.musicofthesoul.com, www.hosparus.org, and www.louisville.edu
Photo: Dr. Joy Berger

Interview:

Tune into your own music within and sounds all around.
Hear music’s artistry and its metaphors of life.
Hear your life’s rhythms and themes, its harmonies and dissonances, your personal styles of beauty and chaos, and everything in between.
Here is God. Hear, God is …
Here — Hear.

For me, the spiritual significance of one’s music is not about the music, but is, rather, about the person’s meanings stirred by music, or expressed through it. Providing a container for the whole Self, a single soundbyte of music can reflect one’s age and stage in life, one’s geography, culture, and faith system. Interweaving many themes and counter themes of one’s life stories, music can tap into and release one’s most intimate emotions, fears, hopes, thoughts, questions, and personal essence, simply within oneself, or with countless others, and with one’s sense of a higher, deeper, and broader Being.

Beyond oneself, music can stir relationships, with those closest to us, and with complete strangers. It can voice unity/unison, harmony, or antithesis with others; in broken silence or rejection of one’s deeper places and spaces within. Like a fire igniting sound and memory, music can bring my past into my present moment. It can light my future paths with in-sight and in-courage- ment.

Hear — Here.
Here is God. Hear, God is …
Here – Hear.

“Like a fire igniting sound and memory, music can bring my past into my present moment.”
– Dr. Joy Berger, author of “Music Of The Soul: Composing Life Out Of Loss”

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