Season 4 · Episode 3
Melanie Ambler
Music at the Bedside: Cello, Mortality, and the Art of Being Present
Some people don't choose their calling, they get rerouted into it. My guest in this episode is Melanie Ambler, a professional cellist and a Stanford-trained physician whose work lives at the rare intersection of music and medicine. She studied neurobiology at Brown, researched music and dementia on a Fulbright in France, and then, when the pandemic pulled her out of that research life, found a new calling at the bedside: improvising live, personalized cello for people facing serious illness and the end of life. This episode is a little different from the deep-dive interviews you may have already heard her give. We don't retrace every chapter of her story. Instead, we sit with the texture of the work itself, what she reads in a room before she plays a single note, what the dying have taught her about living, and why grief and love are closer than we think. Along the way, Melanie improvises a piece live on the show, the first musical performance ever on RareErth.
Core Ideas
- The pandemic as a turning point: from researching music and dementia in France to improvising cello at the hospital bedside.
- The "musical fingerprint": reading a person's comfort, history, and emotional state before choosing a single note.
- Why grief and love sit on the same spectrum, and what people near the end of life reveal about living fully.
- "Sonder": the realization that every random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.
- Protecting your art when it becomes your work: boundaries, "night float," and making the practice sustainable.
- Musical Rounds: turning consented bedside recordings into a weekly podcast of patient stories and improvised soundtracks.
Resources & References
- Connect: Melanie's website, Musical Rounds, Melanie's Instagram, Musical Rounds Instagram. Also on LinkedIn and Facebook.
- Musical Rounds (the podcast): single-take recordings made live at the bedside, where each episode features one patient telling their story largely in their own words, with Melanie improvising the soundtrack. Drawn from a research study of 100 sessions, 75 of whom chose to share their story as a form of legacy. Released weekly, every Tuesday. Listen on Musical Rounds, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, and iHeartRadio.
- Watch first, if you want the fuller story Melanie usually tells: CBS Mornings and We are Stanford Med. More appearances: AAMC Learn Serve Lead, The Nocturnists, "Vital Sounds", The Visible Voices, and the Story Preservation Initiative.
- Introduced through: Anjali (78Health), my guest on the previous episode and the one who connected us. If you have not heard her episode yet, it is well worth a listen.
- People: Tim Amass, Melanie's undergraduate mentor and, at the time, an ICU physician at the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center in Colorado, who said yes to her first hospital concert with no red tape at all.
- The article that started it: the New York Times piece on a doctor and cellist offering virtual concerts to hospital patients during the early months of COVID.
- Music: Jacob Collier, "Something Heavy"; Taylor Swift, "Never Grow Up"; and Melanie's own live, fully improvised piece recorded on the show.
- Books: "Theo of Golden" by Allen Levi; the Twilight series (the one she was, in her words, vehemently against).
- Words & ideas: Sonder, from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig; the Normandy expression "avoir le cul bordé de nouilles", which translates literally to having your backside surrounded by noodles and means you are very lucky.
- Other references: the Fulbright fellowship; the VA (US Department of Veterans Affairs); EMT training; and the longevity research happening at Stanford.
- Places: Normandy (France); Santa Clara and California; Colorado.
- Smell that takes her straight back to childhood: homemade applesauce, made each autumn with her grandmother after picking the apples together.
- The most unexpected place she ever played: a field with around twenty loose horses, for a documentary about the connection between humans and horses. Yes, a horse licked her cello. The film is not out yet.
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