Open to All
You do not need to be currently enrolled at UCLA or any other university to apply. Students, working professionals and others are all welcome to enroll in UCLA Summer Sessions!
Part songwriting workshop, and part guided-research practice, the Songwrights’ Apothecary Lab (SAL), provides a structure for the collaborative development of new compositions designed to offer enhanced therapeutic benefit to listeners/participants.
Musicians, music students, arts-based therapeutic practitioners, and students in related fields gather to research and collaborate in the creation of new/original music devised to offer therapeutic benefit. Each step of our process will be supported and witnessed by experienced practitioners working at the intersection of various medical and therapeutic fields (ex: neuroscience, music therapy, psychology, public health, etc.) and music.
Our Summer 2025 iteration of the Songwrights Apothecary Lab is taking shape as a 6 week course offered through UCLA. In partnership with Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science and The Music Center, the course will reinforce community connections and place-based relevance of the work particularly in weeks 5 and 6 of this course during which the broader South LA community will merge with the UCLA cohort of students and academics.
In this hands-on, community-engaged course, expect to learn via repeated practice how to craft and research collaboratively across therapeutic and music disciplines, and create music with enhanced therapeutic potential/application. This course also emphasizes and leads participants through developing multi-modal forms of evaluating recipient/patient/listener experience.
Participants in this course are not expected to have professional-level, or conservatory-level music skills: a basic ability to effectively create and perform music according to one’s own aesthetic and ability is essential.
See Rave Reviews
“Music as medicine is an old notion, but few artists are trying harder than the multi-instrumentalist, singer, and composer Esperanza Spalding to find its curative properties…”
“The bassist, vocalist and producer’s latest project is a therapeutic suite of songs sparked at an artists’ retreat she started during the pandemic…”
“Esperanza Spalding’s New Songwrights Apothecary Lab Is the Music Therapy We Need Now…”
“With her new compositions and Songwrights Apothecary Lab, the artist explores music’s potential to restore us — and invites listeners to consider how that process works…”
Interested?
Thank you for your interest. The application window officially closed on June 10, 2025. We are no longer accepting new applications at this time.