Knowing what Margaret Updegraff does for a living, you realize that she needs a leisure activity to help her shake off the clutter of the day. An emergency psychiatric nurse at Mercy Franklin Center, she deals often with people in crisis – for example, a 24-year-old having his first psychotic breakdown or a suicidal patient, the kind of human tragedy that can hang on long after the evening commute is over.

It’s a lucky thing for Updegraff, then, that when her daughter packed her belongings for college, she left her cello behind. Updegraff is awed by the instrument’s range and admires its sound, so four and one-half years ago, she began taking lessons. Playing the instrument, Updegraff says, is the only activity she’s found that can chase away the unfinished business of the day. “I have to concentrate on it so hard to do it well that it’s the only thing that can remove me from what I do for a living,” she says.

Updegraff is among the 35 adults taking private lessons through the Des Moines Symphony Academy, which is housed at the downtown Temple for Performing Arts. Some of the students are returning to an instrument played in adolescence, but abandoned in adulthood. Others are beginners. Their reasons for putting music into their lives are as varied as their day jobs.

“A lot of people say it’s calming, or it gives them an outlet for their creativity, a chance to explore talents they didn’t know they have,” says Symphony Academy Director Jenny Graham Zimmerman. “It’s a different challenge to learn as an adult. Adults prefer to be very good at something right away.”

No one has to tell Updegraff that. She began studying piano at age 7 and is an accomplished pianist, a fact that helps her through the occasional stray or sour notes produced by an errant horsehair bow. “To be in your 50s, it’s like trying to learn a new language that would be much easier to learn at 6, 7 or 8,” she says. “It’s very challenging and very humbling, but every once in a while, we hit a nice note.”

Updegraff plays in an adult cello choir with Lori Geadelmann, also a beginner, and veterans Mary Pshonik, a cellist for the Des Moines Symphony as well as Updegraff’s teacher, and Patrick Riley, who has played professionally for 25 years.

“Mary and Patrick are excellent cellists,” Updegraff says. “They’re both so gracious and patient with Lori and myself.”

Geadelmann, a corporate attorney for FBL Financial Group Inc., agrees that playing with accomplished cellists like Pshonik and Riley can be “a little intimidating,” but says it’s “fascinating to hear how they talk about language.”

“It’s just another language for them. As an adult, it’s harder to learn a foreign language, and it’s the same with music.”

Geadelmann had yearned to play the cello, considered to be the instrument making a sound closest to that produced by the human voice, since she was in grade school. She anticipated joining her school’s orchestra as a fourth-grader, but when her family moved from the school district, the cello remained in her case and she picked up the saxophone for a couple of years instead. As an adult, she tried to interest her now 10-year-old son in it, but athletics beckoned. Finally, two and one-half years ago, she admitted to herself that “I’m the one who wants to play the cello, not him,” and began taking private lessons from Derik Claussen at the Symphony Academy.

Geadelmann had taken piano lessons a youngster, could read music and sang some, but none of that prepared her for the experiences she would have as an adult learner. “When you’re a kid taking piano lessons, it’s a chore to practice,” she says. “Now, when the kids go to bed and I sit down and play cello, it’s relaxing and also challenging. This is a way to keep my mind occupied in a different way than work and reading.”

Susan Wees, the Des Moines Symphony’s marketing director, thinks the availability of adult music lessons is especially important in “this financial services and insurance-driven town.”

“People whose work is very linear and very task-driven don’t always have the opportunity to be creative,” she says. “This helps encourage that right side of the brain.”

It’s long been accepted as sound science that young people who are involved in music perform better academically, but a growing body of research suggests the rewards of music may also include improved health and well-being. Researchers at Michigan State University studying 61 retirees taking keyboard lessons in Florida found they had significantly increased levels of human growth hormones, whose secretion by the pituitary gland lowers with age, a condition that leads to osteoporosis, depression, decreased energy levels, wrinkling, lower sexual function, lower muscle mass, and general aches and pains.

“Music is very therapeutic,” Zimmerman sayss. “Music therapy has been shown to not only decrease depression, but also help people heal.”