The Nuts and Bolts of Music Therapy
I've always been someone who was interested in how music therapists do their sessions with clients. I am less interested in doing experimental research as I am in doing phenomenological or maybe epistemological research. I have always been so much more interested in how and why music therapists and clients engage in the act of music therapy than I have been about which type of song produces which effect. I figure that this means that I am very interested in the nuts and bolts of music therapy - the reasons we choose the music and musical elements that we choose during our sessions.
For me, these basic elements require more than just learning how to run a music therapy intervention or to complete a music therapy sessions. These nuts and bolts of music therapy require deeper thinking and purposeful decision-making during the experience. This is not something easily taught in 4 years of undergraduate training, and is also not something that would be easily taught in 6 years of book learning and classroom experience. I feel strongly that the only place to start discovering this deeper understanding of the effect of music on the life of each client is in a full-time, extended period of time immersed in music therapy treatment under the supervision of a highly qualified music therapist.
Enough of the deep stuff. What are these nuts and bolts of music therapy that I am thinking about?
Music skills - without a deep understanding of what music is and how humans experience music, we cannot truly use our modality to affect others. Any type of therapeutic benefit that our clients receive is random - lucky even, not purposeful. Not only do we need to know about how to play all sorts of instruments, we also need to know music theory, music history, music structure, the psychology of music, and how to change and manipulate different elements of music for the benefit of different humans.
People skills - Have you ever been around someone who said that they were a therapist but who just didn't have good interaction skills? There has to be some sort of connection made between client and therapist in order to enhance what the music can do in a session. How do we learn this skill? Guided and directed practice - learning how to be an active listener, developing reflective responses - both verbally and (more importantly) musically, and changing musical elements to reflect what clients are doing in the moment - in various clinical and learning environments help therapists become aware of the various roles of the therapeutic triad during sessions.
Awareness of what is happening musically - this is the most difficult thing for me to explain as it tends to be the most tenuous of all of the topics that I discuss. This tends to be something that most of us don't think about deeply. We simply do it - we change our music to support, challenge, and engage our client. We are doing things with our music, with our relationship skill, with our sense of self as well as our sense of our client, but we often don't know what it is that we are doing. This makes it difficult to replicate results.
What are other things that make up the foundation of music therapy?
For me, these basic elements require more than just learning how to run a music therapy intervention or to complete a music therapy sessions. These nuts and bolts of music therapy require deeper thinking and purposeful decision-making during the experience. This is not something easily taught in 4 years of undergraduate training, and is also not something that would be easily taught in 6 years of book learning and classroom experience. I feel strongly that the only place to start discovering this deeper understanding of the effect of music on the life of each client is in a full-time, extended period of time immersed in music therapy treatment under the supervision of a highly qualified music therapist.
Enough of the deep stuff. What are these nuts and bolts of music therapy that I am thinking about?
Music skills - without a deep understanding of what music is and how humans experience music, we cannot truly use our modality to affect others. Any type of therapeutic benefit that our clients receive is random - lucky even, not purposeful. Not only do we need to know about how to play all sorts of instruments, we also need to know music theory, music history, music structure, the psychology of music, and how to change and manipulate different elements of music for the benefit of different humans.
People skills - Have you ever been around someone who said that they were a therapist but who just didn't have good interaction skills? There has to be some sort of connection made between client and therapist in order to enhance what the music can do in a session. How do we learn this skill? Guided and directed practice - learning how to be an active listener, developing reflective responses - both verbally and (more importantly) musically, and changing musical elements to reflect what clients are doing in the moment - in various clinical and learning environments help therapists become aware of the various roles of the therapeutic triad during sessions.
Awareness of what is happening musically - this is the most difficult thing for me to explain as it tends to be the most tenuous of all of the topics that I discuss. This tends to be something that most of us don't think about deeply. We simply do it - we change our music to support, challenge, and engage our client. We are doing things with our music, with our relationship skill, with our sense of self as well as our sense of our client, but we often don't know what it is that we are doing. This makes it difficult to replicate results.
What are other things that make up the foundation of music therapy?
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