Former NICU patient returns to New York City hospital to play classical music for babies

Born 16 weeks early, Isabella Ciriello spent the first three months of her life in the neonatal intensive care unit, listening to Mozart sonatas inside her incubator.

Ciriello's doctor at New York-Presbyterian Komansky Children's Hospital, Jeffrey Perlman, told her mother that premature babies find classical music soothing, and she began playing it for her daughter when she was about 49 days old. Now 12, Ciriello plays the guitar, piano, and drums, and believes that this early exposure sparked her interest in classical music.

Last summer, Ciriello asked to meet the doctor who took care of her in the NICU, and during lunch with Perlman, he told her that he would love to have an "orchestra of all my favorite patients" come back and play for the babies now in the NICU. Ciriello took him up on his offer, and held a performance in the NICU to mark World Prematurity Month, playing five songs on her guitar. It wasn't just the babies taking in the music — nurses and doctors, including some who took care of Ciriello 12 years ago, came in to listen. "I was in their position once," Ciriello said of the babies, and "it feels good to give back and help them." Catherine Garcia

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