October 6, 2025 | Blogs and News
Raffi Tachdjian, MD, MPH, founder & president of Children’s Music Fund reflects on the founding of our organization.
Sometimes one moment changes everything.
For me, the journey that became the Children’s Music Fund (CMF) started in 2002, while I was in pediatrics residency at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), currently part of the Mass General Brigham Partners system. It was there that I met Justin, a remarkable young patient battling aggressive bone cancer. Justin had already been through round after round of treatment and endured experimental therapies.
During my time with him, I began to realize that while traditional medicine could try to address the symptoms of his illness, music had the ability to treat his spirit and emotional well-being in ways medicine could not. In one of my hospital rounds, it hit me. I believed that offering music to Justin, while a nice gesture and fun break from treatment, might also be a source of real healing. And I quickly found that to be true.
Justin was a guitar virtuoso who had just come through his final round of unsuccessful experimental treatments for osteosarcoma. As a musician myself, I understood the therapeutic power of music and knew it had to be part of Justin’s care. At the time, instruments weren’t readily available in the hospital, but I went to the local music shop to buy a guitar, and I joined him in playing. Simple sounds of laughter and music healed us at that moment. No, it didn’t cure his cancer, but over those sessions something shifted. His spirits lifted. Conversations opened. His family—caught in a cycle of treatments, tests, waiting—found a respite. In that safe, musical space, medicine’s limits expanded and became more bearable.
That small act of reintroducing music into Justin’s life at MGH was the seed. It planted the idea that children and young adults facing serious illness didn’t just need medical care, they needed compassion, creative outlets, and emotional connection. And from that seed sprouted the Children’s Music Fund.
Why It Matters: From That First Note to a National Mission
My experience with Justin at MGH showed me firsthand several things:
- Music Therapy is legitimate medicine: It is an established health profession led by board-certified therapists who use music within a therapeutic relationship to address physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs. Back by research, Music Therapy has shown to aid rehabilitation, motivate patients to engage in treatment, provide emotional support for families, and open pathways of communication when words fall short.
- Holistic healing is real: Physical treatment matters deeply, but emotional wellness, joy, hope, and connection are powerful forces too. Music offers patients more than a welcomed break from treatment; it helps restore parts of themselves that their illnesses had taken.
- Connection heals: When Justin played, when we played together, it became a community experience filled with family, patient and health care team all sharing something deeply human beyond illness. CMF continues to cultivate that community with patients across the country.
Those lessons shaped Children’s Music Fund’s mission to bring Music Therapy into the lives of children facing chronic, life-altering illness; to create personalized sessions; to gift instruments; and to help families find comfort and meaning during trauma. At its heart, our mission is about giving children the joy of music when they need it most. And it’s the impact of that music that can make a difference in every child’s life, even for just a moment. The same was true for Justin.
The Legacy of That First Moment
Justin’s story is just one of the tens of thousands of Music Therapy sessions we’ve facilitated. His experience lives on through every session we support, every instrument we provide, and every child and family who finds a voice, a melody, a place to feel safe through music.
From that first music session at Mass General Hospital:
- CMF has delivered thousands of music therapy sessions nationwide.
- CMF has worked to remove barriers. Not just for patients, but also for Music Therapists by making training, certification, and financial support more accessible.
- CMF works with children where they are. We’ve integrated music into hospital settings, homes, clinics, and any setting where children are undergoing difficult medical journeys.
And always, I remember, how it started with one child, one guitar, and the simple question: What else can we do?