Linda Maguire is an internationally renowned musician with a red carpet career spanning 23 years. She has done over 80 live radio broadcasts, several recordings, and has been a featured soloist at the Kennedy Center eight times performing pieces by Mahler, Bach, Beethoven, and Handel.
Maguire is still performing, but in the last few years she has turned her musical talents toward a new theme: healing. In her quest to marry music and medicine, she recently acquired two master’s degrees, one from George Mason University in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, and another at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she studied health science and gerontology.
The fruits of this marriage already show. Earlier this year Maguire published a study which strongly suggests that music can improve mood, behavior, and cognition. The study was a collaboration with Jane Flinn, a behavioral neuroscientist at George Mason, and published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. The team looked at 45 patients with either Alzheimer’s or other dementia. Participants sang songs that Maguire selected for their therapeutic value. They included ‘Edelweiss’ from the Sound of Music, and ’Somewhere Over the Rainbow' from the Wizard of Oz.
