Sing A Song Sunday - Peter from Peter and the Wolf

I picked up a Sheet Music magazine from the 1980's this morning for Sing A Song Sunday and found one of my favorite pieces of music inside, Peter from Peter and the Wolf by Serge Prokofiev. Hooray!

My family had a copy of the 1960 recording of this piece by Captain Kangaroo (AKA Bob Keeshan), and my brother listened to it over and over again. My sister and I also listened to it, but my brother really loved the piece. As I was looking over some of the information that's out there about the piece, I found that it was composed in order to encourage children to listen to music, especially classical music. Originally performed in Moscow on May 2, 1936, the piece has been performed, recorded, animated, and acted every since. This piece of program music presents a story.

What I like about this piece is that each character in the piece has a different instrumentation making it easy to identify each character. The differences in timbre make it a bit easier to identify what is going on in the story.

As I've been thinking about clinical use of this music, I hit upon a restructuring idea for my students working in areas of trauma-sensitive care. The programmatic nature of the music could be used to change the story making it more personal for each client. Start with six characters in the trauma situation and assign a musical theme to each character. Use the music to write the story. Who is the "hero" in the story? Who is the "threat?" Who are the people that accompanied the hero in his or her quest? What does the "hero" have to do to close the situation? Can the situation be closed?

I'm going to post this and think about how I could use this with my particular clients.

How could you use this piece therapeutically? Let me know!