The Brain and Music

 For professional musicians or music lovers, the more music you’re familiar with, the better chance you have a using music for healing purposes, if something goes wrong, or if you just want to increase your wellness.  Here’s a wonderful example of a young opera singer who was able to use the music she had learned to heal her rare brain disorder:

For aspiring opera singer Sandra Marante, music is her very life. So it’s only fitting it was music that helped save that life.

The 25-year-old Cooper City woman was felled by a rare brain malady just before obtaining her master’s degree in vocal profession at Roosevelt University in Chicago last fall. Surgeons later used opera music to track the abnormality and safely remove it.

“Everything that I’ve accomplished has made me stronger because of music,” she said.

Since an early age Marante has trilled tunes like an ebullient bird, having once belted out the national anthem before 70,000 fans at a Miami Dolphins game. At 13 she sang at bar mitzvahs and weddings. She recorded pop songs in Sweden as well as radio intros locally. She sang opera in Italy.

But last November, during a school rehearsal for the opera “Cinderella,” in which she played the lead, Marante suffered a seizure. Doctors determined a potentially lethal mass of tangled blood vessels was the cause. Yet to remove it surgically might jeopardize her ability to sing.

So Dr. Bernard Bentok and colleagues at Northwestern Memorial Hospital took a novel approach. Over several weeks, they had Marante undergo a series of MRI tests while opera music played. They asked the lyric soprano to visualize singing the parts.

“They used it as a tracking or GPS for how I used my brain for music,” she said.

Examining the scans, doctors determined they could carve out the abnormality without affecting Marante’s vocal skills. The student made her March 2012 graduation, singing a 50-minute solo in five languages.

She’s now enrolled in a young artists program at Dicapo Opera Theatre in New York, where she’ll play Belle in “Beauty and the Beast” in a children’s production.

“She’s adorable and talented,” said Judith Haddon, Marante’s voice professor. “She is brave and determined, she has overcome this.”

The brain affliction was the second time Marante turned to music to sustain her through adversity. In 2006, a misplaced candle in a Miami nightclub caught the student’s dress afire, leaving her with severe burns on her back and arms.

During months of painful recuperation, Marante decided to switch from pop to the more rigorous operatic discipline. “When I’m able to accomplish something musical, it makes me feel like I’m myself again,” she said. “It’s the way I strive to get better.”

Said her father, Tom, a former football coach and current social studies teacher at Piper High School in Sunrise: “I think of all she’s gone through, I look at her and she’s my role model.”

While being wheeled out of surgery last December, Marante strove to sing to her parents. “I was actually whispering,” she said.

She warbled an aria from the Antonin Dvorak opera “Rusalka.” It was about a mermaid losing her voice.

“It’s ironic that I picked that song,” Marante said.

rnolin@tribune.com or 954-356-4525