Kahn Auditorium
Panel Discussion:
Renée Fleming’s Music and Mind
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Soprano superstar Renée Fleming is a leading advocate for the study of powerful connections between the arts and health, and has worked with the National Institutes of Health and other leading organizations to bring attention to research and practice at the intersection of music, health, and neuroscience. The day before her performance in Ann Arbor, she will be joined by local researchers and medical practitioners for a public conversation exploring these important topics.
Presented in partnership with Michigan Medicine.
With support from All Seasons.
Renée Fleming is one of the most highly acclaimed singers of our time, performing on the stages of the world’s great opera houses and concert halls. Honored with five Grammy® awards and the US National Medal of Arts, she has sung for momentous occasions from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony to the Super Bowl. In May, Renée was named a Goodwill Ambassador for Arts and Health for the World Health Organization, and in June it was announced that she will become a Kennedy Center Honoree this fall.
A leading advocate for research at the intersection of arts, health, and neuroscience, Renée launched the first ongoing collaboration between The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Institutes of Health. She has presented her program Music and Mind in more than 50 cities around the world. During the pandemic, she created Music and Mind LIVE, a weekly web show amassing nearly 700,000 views, from 70 countries. She is now a founding advisor for major initiatives including the Sound Health Network at the University of California San Francisco and the NeuroArts Blueprint, a project of Johns Hopkins University and the Aspen Institute.
Renée’s current concert calendar includes appearances in London, Paris, Vienna, and at Carnegie Hall. Recent opera performances include starring in the world premiere of The Hours at the Metropolitan Opera, and as Pat Nixon in a new production of Nixon in China at the Opéra de Paris.
Renée’s recording Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album. In January, Decca released a special double-length album of live recordings from Renée’s iconic performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Renée Fleming: Greatest Moments at the Met.
Other awards include the 2023 Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum, the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, and honorary doctorates from eight leading universities.
Director of the Neurology Residency Program and James W. Albers Collegiate Professor of Neurology, Michigan Medicine
Zach London, M.D. is a Professor in the University of Michigan Medical School. Dr. London grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Brown University in 1997. He attended medical school at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, graduating in 2001. He completed a Preliminary Medicine Internship at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor in 2001, followed by Neurology Residency at the University of Michigan. After graduation from residency, he did a one-year fellowship in Clinical Neurophysiology/EMG at the University of Michigan.
He joined the University of Michigan faculty as a neuromuscular neurologist in 2006, and has served as Program Director of the neurology residency program.
Music Therapist and Studio Manager of Sophie’s Place at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital
Meredith Irvine, MHA, MT-BC, NICU MT, is a board-certified music therapist and Sophie’s Place Studio Manager at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. She serves as the music therapy supervisor at Mott in addition to her clinical work and is an established local and regional presenter. Ms. Irvine is a published author in Voices, an online music therapy journal. She remains passionate about growing advocacy and awareness for the field of music therapy within Mott, as well as regionally and nationally.
Assistant Professor of Music (Musicology) at U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance
Dr. Lwanga is an ethnomusicologist, composer/theorist, and percussionist. His research in ethnomusicology examines the role of popular music in transforming Uganda’s public sphere into a participatory arena. As a composer, Lwanga’s creative output is grounded through the lenses of interculturalism, creative musicology and African pianism. Lwanga has read a variety of research papers at annual conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and at the African Studies Association (ASA).
Before successfully defending his doctoral degree in ethnomusicology (on March 2, 2020), Lwanga made the record for having received the African Libraries Student Paper Prize twice (in 2019 and 2015). This prize is awarded by the African Music section of the Society for Ethnomusicology in recognition of the most distinguished student paper delivered on the topic of African and/or African diasporan music at the SEM annual meeting during a previous year. Lwanga is also a recipient of the 2015 Robert M. Stevenson prize awarded biannually by the Society of Ethnomusicology to honor the best composition by an ethnomusicologist.
Professor of Internal Medicine and Interim Section Head of Cardiovascular Medicine at U-M Medical School
Dr. Bisognano is Clinical Professor of Medicine and Director of General, Consultative, and Preventive Cardiology at the University of Michigan. He earned his bachelor’s degree from MIT and holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the State University of New York at Binghamton, and an M.D. from Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. He completed a residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Hypertension at the University of Michigan and then completed a fellowship in Cardiovascular Disease, specializing in Advanced Heart Failure and Transplantation at the University of Colorado. He joined the faculty at the University of Rochester in 2001 during the founding era of a new Program in Heart Failure and Transplantation, where he also served as Director of Outpatient Cardiology and the Comprehensive Hypertension Center of Excellence. He was medical director of AHP, the accountable care organization associated with the University of Rochester. He returned to the University of Michigan in 2021 and sees patients on the inpatient cardiology services, the inpatient consultative service, and in the outpatient clinics in Ann Arbor and Brighton. His area of specialty includes general cardiology as well as severe and resistant hypertension, lipid management, and management of patients with chronic heart failure and ischemic coronary and vascular disease.