So, my sojourn through the music therapy archives has ended with around 200 pages of information scanned into my computer, ready for further digestion. I probably have enough for two separate papers - one on competence development in interns, and another on the history of internship programs themselves.
Like I said in my last post, the archives are very user friendly and everyone is helpful. I highly encourage everyone to dive into the archives at least once in their careers.
I have some pictures from a scrapbook assembled in 1965. There are pictures of therapists, clients, and music therapy dignitaries. I do not know who assembled the scrapbook, but they did everything that I've been taught to do in my own scrapbooks. It was interesting to look at, matted well, and had wonderful front pages for each of the sections. It was humbling to realize that the scrapbook was older than me (Can you tell I work with folks who have some egocentric outlooks on life?). This profession has a history that extends before and after each one of us. We owe so much to those who have gone before, and we owe the future generations the benefit of our knowledge and interests.
It has always puzzled me why research is concerned with only the previous 15 years. I could understand that if the topic that you are researching has changed dramatically in the past years, but music therapy has not really changed that much. (Ooh, potentially inflammatory statement!) We seem to be doing the same types of things that the music therapists of old did with clients. We may know more about what is happening within the brain when we sing or play music, but we are still singing and playing that music. There is a link that we miss when we ignore the previous 45 years of music therapy tradition.
I am interested in what music therapists did with persons with intellectual disabilities in the past. I am more interested in how they led sessions than research. I have a yearning to know what others do when they are leading sessions. Tell me what you do in your sessions. What types of clients do you work with? What is your favorite thing to do during a session?
My favorite is "rocket raps," named for the visual aids that I used - no other reason. I have a bunch of words written on rocket cards and a CD full of beat tracks. I start the CD and then we pick a rocket. Everyone makes a comment or adds a word to the rap as we pass the rocket around the group. There is no time limit for length of contribution. We can generally go on for 25 minutes without stopping. The words vary - some are silly, some are serious, some are specifically chosen to elicit information from clients. It works.
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