How Clemency Burton-Hill Treated Her Brain with Music
On the morning of 20 January 2020, there was a moment when Clemency Burton-Hill suddenly realised that something was very, very wrong.
It was Martin Luther King Day and her husband, the diplomat James Roscoe, had taken her two young sons to the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. They had planned to meet that afternoon, but they never did. Burton-Hill, a London-born broadcaster who is the creative director at the New York classical music radio station WQXR, had gone to Brooklyn for a meeting, where she was presenting her ideas for an upcoming musical program at a new local venue.
“Music is my whole life, it’s a part of me,” she told us one evening in a musical soirée hosted by Dr Paul Grewal and Dr Jack Kreindler. “I’ve been classically-trained in violin since I was very small, but I’m obsessed with all genres of music.” She has performed with some of the most venerated classical musicians of our time, taking violin lessons with the late Yehudi Meuhim and touring with conductor Daniel Barenboim.
Clemency still has a few disconnected memories of what happened at that work meeting in Brooklyn. She presented her ideas — a series of intimate concerts and conversations with contemporary musicians — and, as the meeting was ending, she texted her producer. Then, she felt unable to speak. She was conscious of words, clearly formed in her brain, coming out of her mouth as slurred gibberish. “It was the most incredibly frightening experience. Words don’t make sense to describe what that feels like,” she recalls. She lost consciousness and collapsed.
She was taken to the Brooklyn Hospital Centre, where a scan revealed a massive brain hemorrhage on her left frontal lobe. The bleeding had been caused by an arteriovenous malformation (AVM), an entangled mass of arteries and veins in her brain that likely developed before she was even born. “I had no idea that this AVM was lurking in my brain, probably from birth,” she says. AVMs are rare, affecting less than one percent of the population. Even rarer are instances when they rupture and bleed into the brain, an incident that’s often fatal.
Clemency was immediately transferred to Mount Sinai West hospital in Manhattan, where she was attended by neurosurgeon Christopher Kellner . “Her original hemorrhage, which was very large and was causing her difficulty speaking and moving her arm on the right side, had expanded by then,” Kellner explained. “We had to do an emergency procedure. The blood was taking up more than half of the brain at that point.” Her brain was so swollen, that they would have to remove the left part of her skull to alleviate the pressure. Before the procedure, the surgeon explained to her husband what they were about to do. Roscoe asked him if he had a stereo. “Do you mind playing some specific music?” he asked Keller. He didn’t and operated on Clemency’s brain while listening to Bach.
Her life was saved but she remained unconscious for another 17 days. Her family was informed that she might not recover. Undeterred, they compiled a playlist — Bach, Max Richter, jazz, funk — and asked for it to be played day and night on a speaker by her bed. “James and my closest family and friends were literally pumping me with music when I was in a coma.”
When she came round, she couldn’t speak, walk, or move the right side of her body. “It was a kind of a nightmare. I was trying to get out of it, but I just couldn’t,” she says. To her dismay, she also found listening to music almost unbearable. “I couldn't deal with music because nothing was making sense.”
By March, Clemency was discharged to a rehabilitation hospital to relearn how to walk and talk. Around this period, the COVID-19 pandemic had peaked in New York, forcing the hospital into lockdown. She contracted a mild case of COVID and was isolated, her speech therapy sessions delivered by a therapist in a hazmat suit. Still, she persisted in listening to music every day. “Doctor Kellner always believed that there was something about music that could save my brain,” she says. From her hospital bed, she also completed the manuscript of her new book, 'Another Year of Wonder”, painstakingly typing it on her mobile phone with her left thumb.
One day, one of her friends, the violinist Nicola Benedetti, paid a visit and brought her violin. Together, they attempted a Bach piece, with Benedetti bowing and Clemency playing the fingerboard. She started crying when she realised she could still remember the notes. “It's a clichéd idea that music is beyond language," she said in an interview for the Times, "but from what I've experienced in my own brain, I truly know that now."
On April 10, fifty days after her brain hemorrhage, her cognition restored and her language fluency mostly regained, she walked out of the hospital on her own. “Although it might sound ridiculous, the platitudinous equivalent of sticking a Band-Aid over a brain hemorrhage, I still believe music is, above all else, a source of hope,” she writes in ‘Another Year of Music’. “Of radical, robust hope.”
Clemency continues to recover, thanks to the neural stimulant of music.
Another Year of Wonder: Classical Music for Every Day is out now.