At CHOMP, licensed musicians use an ancient instrument to help transport patients to a peaceful place.

Next to a hospital bed at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, Vivian Sarubbi plucks a 32-string harp, filling the air with soft, soothing harmony. It’s hard to say for how long, because the sound seems to stop time.

This is despite the fact that in the background is the screeching beep of a fire alarm that has been going off all along – a false alarm, and a frequent occurrence in hospitals, her colleagues say – but as she plays the song “Dawning of the Day,” reading the notes off of sheet music in front of her, the alarm is barely audible.

“The ear goes to the most harmonic sound,” Sarubbi says, “which would be the harp.”

Sarubbi has been an oncology nurse for 40 years, but in 2008, she heard Lynda Jardine playing the harp at Pacific Cancer Care in Monterey, and Sarubbi was transfixed.

She knew Jardine played to patients at another CHOMP facility, Westland House – playing for patients in their rooms is something musicians need to be trained and licensed for, so that they understand important medical concepts – and Sarubbi set out to do the same.

It’s not music therapy, per se, which is more interactive – it’s palliative. Or as Sarubbi puts it, “It’s like they’re getting a massage.”

What Sarubbi and a handful of other certified clinical musicians at CHOMP do, as part of the hospital’s healing arts program, is play harp music to select patients six days a week for four hours in the afternoon. Thanks to a generous donation to the hospital’s foundation, it’s free to the patients, who, along with relatives, nurses and doctors, can request it for any number of reasons: to lower stress and anxiety, bring on relaxation and sleep, and in some cases even distract from great pain. Or, it can just be to provide comfort.

CHOMP has offered the service since 2014, and Sarubbi was instrumental in its genesis: After seeing Jardine play harp, she eventually enrolled in a certification program in 2013, but she needed a place to complete an internship. A couple of doctors she worked with – Roger Schiffman and John Hausdorff – advocated the program with hospital administration. They OK’d its launch, and it has grown since: It started at three half-days, then went up to five, and is now at six. They comforted 5,443 patients with music in 2017.

Jardine, already licensed, came on first, and Sarubbi, as her intern, learned from a lifelong musician. “It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done,” Sarubbi says. She also extols the virtues of the harp, which is the only instrument where every chord is connected to the same sound board, so plucking one string causes reverberations in all the others.

“There are undertones and overtones. It’s a heavenly sound, other-worldly, it takes you away,” she says.

Christine Payne, director of nursing support services at CHOMP, launched the program, and so far, so good.

“It’s awesome all the way,” Payne says. “We brought it in for patients, but we found tremendous benefit for our staff. Musicians have noticed nurses pick a computer near the music.”

Sarubbi has a good idea why.

“Harps are an instrument of healing that go all the way back to ancient Egypt,” she says. “[They’re] being brought into hospitals all around the country, and world.”

Sarubbi, who still works 30 hours a week as a nurse (and eight hours as a therapeutic musician), has many touching stories about those she’s comforted in times of pain, and her eyes brighten as she recounts them.

Perhaps most telling is this: She played her harp for a woman in labor who was in great pain, but who fell asleep while listening to Sarubbi’s music. She recalls nurses, who were also monitoring the unborn baby in the womb, saying: “You put that baby to sleep, not just the mom.”