Giving music to others to lift their spirits, commune soul-to-soul, and … make them feel better! That’s music outreach. You can do it anywhere—in a nursing home or hospital, in your own home, in your school, in a concert hall—anywhere.

Tin Pan Alley songs are great for doing music outreach. They are easy to sing, easy to learn, easy to teach, and easy for everybody to sing together. They were designed for it.

And you don’t have to be a musician—all you have to do is to want to give the music from your heart. That’s something we all know how to do—although sometimes we have to be reminded!

The Tin Pan Alley Project offers you resources to help you learn songs and to learn about doing music outreach programs.

First, there are the writings and lectures of Dr. John Diamond, M.D. who is widely recognized as a leading authority on the use of music and the creative arts as tools for life enhancement and healing. He founded the Institute for Music and Health. You can find out more about his work and also read some of his articles on his website.

There is a brief description there of the Institute for Music and Health.

And several of Dr. Diamond’s articles on music can be read for free on the site, including:

“Lucky and His Magic Broom.” Lucky is an amateur musician—a folk musician—in Austria, who plays music on a broom!

“Cantillatory Music” – Dr. Diamond uses “cantillation” to mean that feeling where you know you are loved by your mother, and you “sing” (literally or metaphorically) back to her in gratitude and love in return.

Several students and diplomats of the Institute for Music and Health of have sites where you can find detailed discussion and descriptions of music outreach programs.

In Dutchess and Putnam counties in New York state, USA, Dr. Peter and Judith Muir run the Center for Personal Development through Music, through which they run Community Outreach Music Programs (or COMPs). Their sites are:

The Center for Personal Development Through Music
Judith Muir Life Energy

On the website of the Center for Personal Development you can read two wonderful articles by Dr. Muir on the topic of music outreach programs:

1) The Benefits of Community Outreach Music Programs (COMPs) on the Teaching of Musical Instruments: Preliminary Thoughts and Observations

2) The Canberra Hand-in-Hand Program

In Canberra, Australia, Dr. Susan West runs the Hand-in-Hand Music Program. She has grade school kids singing for everybody—seniors in nursing homes, other students, the whole city! You can read about this program at the site of the Life Energy Foundation.

About 65% of the songs used in the Hand-in-Hand Music Program are Tin Pan Alley songs!

“Mining Tin Pan Alley” is Dr. West’s scholarly article about the Hand-in-Hand Music Program, and it also can be read on the Life Energy Foundation site .

A full-length, scholarly case study of the Hand-in-Hand Music Program has been written by Dr. Susan Joyce Carpenter Garber:

Susan J. Garber, “The Hand-in-Hand Community Music Program: A Case Study,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Australian National University, 2004.

You can read online about Susan's intergenerational music outreach program at the Lavelle School for the Blind in the Bronx, New York: "Music Has No Age Limit at Lavelle."