At the end of the fall 2024 semester, Tandon professor Melissa Maldonado-Salcedo assigned her Media Ethics class to construct an “illness narrative,” or a project designed to promote health literacy and understanding among the public. Chemical and biomolecular engineering junior Andrea Durham opted to construct this narrative from behind a piano.

Durham is passionate about science and music, two pursuits that she has dedicated herself to for over a decade. She had studied medical science at her STEM-oriented high school in Hackensack, NJ, and took weekly piano lessons at a local music academy. Numbers from the likes of Sergei Rachmaninoff to the latest pop songs, or more recently, gospel music, have remained staples in her repertoire despite no longer taking lessons after arriving at NYU’s Brooklyn campus.

Maldonado-Salcedo, a medical anthropologist and classical pianist, encouraged her students to be creative when writing their proposals. Durham saw the assignment as an opportunity to reconnect with her late grandmother Annie, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. The result, “memories of you,” is a succinct, six-song album memorializing her time with her grandmother. The collection begins with the song “goodbye.”

“You’re saying goodbye at the start, because that’s when you know everything else starts to degrade,” Durham said. “You know she’s there, but it’s not the same because you can’t talk to them or communicate with them in the same way.”

Annie was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when Durham was six years old. Visiting her regularly in Trinidad alongside her family not only allowed her to spend time with her grandmother in the midst of the illness, but to witness how it changed her.

“I was pretty young at first, so I wasn’t completely aware of what the disease would look like,” Durham said. “It became more apparent to me as time went on what was actually happening.”

Annie passed away in 2020 when Durham was just 17 years old. When Durham looks back on the 11 years of visitation and support, she remembers the ways in which they cared for one another. Annie would cook for Durham and brush her hair before the disease stripped her of that autonomy. While certain habits of love grew harder and harder as the disease progressed, their time together remained grounded through music. During her piano lessons, Durham made a habit of sitting at the bench of her grandmother’s piano and playing her songs — a shared enjoyment that persisted throughout years of visits.

“Music is something I think is very special because it transcends things like language barriers,” Durham said. “It’s not something you need education to understand. It’s something that you feel, and it’s like something that anybody can relate to, that anybody can be moved by.”

The composition process behind “memories of you” was not only a practice in looking back on her own memories, but also one of empathizing and refamiliarizing herself with what her grandmother must have been going through. These recollections and musings are reflected in each song’s musical style, where Durham actively incorporated a variety of sounds and techniques that would be reflective of both her grandmother’s journey and their relationship. 

“‘cycle of decline.’ was about seeing her status decline over the years,” Durham said. “It felt like a very repetitive process of just seeing the condition worsen. ‘journey through the unknown.’ was reflective of what I felt like I was going through — what I felt like my grandmother was going through. She probably wasn’t aware of her surroundings. So for her, the world probably looked like a journey through the unknown — and for me as well, because I was pretty young and I didn’t really understand at some points what she was going through.”

“cycle of decline.” features repeated melodic patterns, and “journey through the unknown.” holds a quicker pace and quick, trepidatious harmonies — both holding sonic features that correlate with the themes and memories within.

This project was Durham’s first experience writing her own music, and composing the music behind it was an instinctual, spontaneous process. She freehanded the music, experimenting and improvising until it was time to hit record. Each time she revisits the composition it sounds a bit different in the same way that memories shift and change as you recollect them.

“With playing the piano, it’s not only about the notes that you play, it’s also about how you play it,” Durham said. “I thought about particular moments, and I played what I felt like matched those feelings.” 

Alongside her studies, Durham currently volunteers in the neurology department at NYU Langone Health and hopes to earn a Ph.D. in cell or molecular biology after graduation. She aims to continue research and hopes to merge music and science in her career as a means to promote health literacy and empathy while removing barriers around understanding disease.

“It’s really important to be able to understand others and what they’re going through,” Durham said. “I think people should be the thing that gives research purpose.”