Just A Song Sunday: Variations on a Theme

I have recently returned to my home from the super regional conference between the Western region and the Midwestern region of the American Music Therapy Association. It was a good trip - lots of time in the car to myself, a hotel room, and two presentations that were well received. A friend of mine got an award that she wasn't ready for, and I saw some of you there. (Thanks for reading and for talking to me about the blog, by the way!) All in all, it was a good way to start my spring break and get my mind turned towards my quest for a deeper understanding of this profession. I wish I could have been there for the second day of sessions, but life often has other plans, and I had to make it back here for worship leadership this morning (I can't begrudge the pastor his own study leave!). So, I skipped out a day early.

I like attending conferences because they always remind me about why I love being a music therapist. There is something so reaffirming about being with a group of people who understand that we are all together in this professional journey.

I am a person who thinks in analogies, so the concept of our professional lives as theme and variations makes sense to me right now. 

What I heard over and over again at conference was that we were all experiencing the same types of things, but in slightly different ways. I had the privilege of speaking on some difficult topics, and it seems that others were able to understand the reasons behind my discussions as well as relate to them in ways that I was able to understand as well. While our exact circumstances were different, we were united by a common theme. People told me over and over again that they were happy to hear that there were others who experienced things that they thought were unique and devastating to them as therapists.

I wonder if this analogy would be something that others would understand (I may have come up with a title for a CMTE series...). I think we learn the theme while we are in our education processes. We learn the general information and believe that that will be the theme that we hear and play when we start our career. We then enter our internships and find the first variation - not everyone plays the theme the same way we know it. If we are lucky, we realize that we can make our own variation on the theme. Many times, though, I think we want to go back to the old familiar strain (and I also think we expect that we should be able to use the theme in all of our music therapy interactions).

Taking this analogy a bit farther.

I remember thinking that I was a music therapy failure because my path in this profession was significantly different from the paths of my peers. I wasn't able to play the theme the way they did. My way of playing the theme taught to us all was different from the way they played the theme (my professors often commented that I did things differently from everyone else - I took it as a correction when I was an undergrad - I yearned to be like the group). Hard as I tried, I couldn't replicate the nuances of the original theme - I had to interpret it in my own way. (Interestingly, most of the group are not music therapists any more. Hmmm.)

My father is a music lover. His favorite piece of music is Scheherazade by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, but he only really loves one performance of that piece. He will listen when others perform, but for him, the interpretation that he loves and knows the best is the one that he had on an LP when he was young. He has listened to many other performers complete the piece over the years, and it is just not the same for him.

I had to find him a recording of that particular performance on CD several years ago, and it was difficult to find. I finally did so, and you could tell that the variations in performance mattered to him deeply. He wanted his music to remain what he knew and what gave him comfort.

I think we often want to keep things exactly the same as well, but the reality is that variations will occur.

I am going to think about this a bit more and leave it for now.

What do you think about this concept? Is it one that you can relate to? Can you identify the themes in your clinical work? The foundation themes? The variations that happen because you are who you are? The variations that happen because your clients are unique individuals? This is the direction I'm going with this thought. Please share your ideas. I want to know if this makes sense. It's starting to come clearer in my mind.