Listening for Calm: Music and Well-being in Times of Uncertainty

This concluding panel of the Music in a Time of Crisis Series explores how music, sound, and mindfulness practices can support personal and collective well-being, resilience, and community care in times of uncertainty and polycrisis. Drawing from artistic practice, facilitation, contemplative practice, community-based arts, wellbeing, and emerging brain science, panelists will discuss how sonic environments, intentional listening, and participatory musical practices can help individuals and groups regulate, integrate, and build embodied capacity in the face of stress and trauma. The conversation will consider how music and sound function not only as expression, but as shared spaces for co-regulation, reflection, and restoration—offering tools to navigate tension, cultivate presence, and sustain collective care across communities. Molly Sturges and Chance York will also invite participants into a brief experiential practice, drawing from direct experience with communities and individuals facing distress.

This School of Music event is free & open to the public. 

Artist Bios

Chance York

Chance York is Director of Peace in Practice, a nonprofit that offers mindfulness and movement-based practices designed to increase access to wellbeing and resilience, particularly within BIPOC and historically underserved communities. He is a mindfulness, yoga, and chi gong instructor who teaches at the University of Minnesota Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing and serves as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) faculty. His work focuses on making contemplative practices accessible to communities experiencing stress and uncertainty. York is also a rapper and previous host of the Twin Cities PBS series Outside Chance, an award-winning program exploring growth, resilience, and community through outdoor experiences.

Molly Sturges

Molly Sturges is a creativity liberationist, educator-activist, composer-performer, and community healing facilitator working at the crossroads of participatory music, community organizing, integrative health, spirituality, and education. She co-founded several intergenerational community healing projects, including Lifesongs, a hospice-based program connecting youth and elders through song. Molly is faculty with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality & Healing and a senior researcher at the Tess Lab at UMN, exploring integrative health, neuromodulation, and therapeutic sound. Molly leads  a range of community-focused programs with HeART of Healing at UMN and is an active member of Singing Resistance. Molly is a founding member of Musika Medica, a peace, justice and kinship musical medicine project based in the Twin Cities.