Song Conversion Sunday: Choosing Something to Convert

It is again time for a Song Conversion Sunday post. It's amazing how these things come up every week! (Lame attempt to be funny here!!) Anyway, I thought I would expand on my ideas about why this sort of process is so important to me and to my therapy practice while going through part of my current routine. 

I've been a music therapist for many years at this point. I've spent most of my career working with persons with intellectual/developmental disabilities and chronic psychiatric challenges. I have all sorts of therapeutic music experiences (TME - the name I use for the things that I do with my clients during sessions) that I have collected, written, used, refined, and abandoned over the years. The nature of this job, at least for me, is that I am always looking for more TME ideas, more songs, more ways to connect with my clients during music therapy interactions. I want new music and new ideas, so I often go out looking for them!

I keep an idea book with me almost all the time. When inspiration strikes (sometimes as I am commuting home from work at 70 miles per hour on the highway), I try to capture that idea as quickly as I can to develop later on. I may be inspired by a sunset or a memory or an interaction or by a billboard. There is no real rhyme or reason to how I find new ideas, but I am always open to those ideas when they arrive.

This process of exploring songs to find ways to use them in therapy sessions is something that combines materials I already have available (translation - things that I have already spent money on, so no more money going out right now) with my creative process and thoughts about what is important in music therapy. It gives me some structure but does not keep me bound to rigid protocol. I can mix things up and still get to my desired outcome - increased options for my clients!

My home is set up in a way that collects the sheet music resources into two areas. Eventually those two areas will merge into one, but I've fallen off the "moving things around" wagon lately. I'm basically in the "just try to keep the stuff from taking over" stage at the moment. Anyway, when I am getting ready for this series of posts, I head over to the sheet music resources and pull something off the shelves in a random manner - I even try to close my eyes to increase the randomness. That's the way that I select something to convert - pull a random piece of music off the shelf and then flip to a random page (if necessary) to select the actual song. That's it. That's the entire process.

After I've selected a song, it is time to go through the next steps of my plan. You've been through that process before in the past two months. Learning the song, analyzing the therapeutic elements of the music, and then figuring out a therapeutic purpose for using the music with my clients.

For the next several weeks, I'm going to be engaging in different posts - mainly because I will be out of my regular routine - Song Conversion Sunday will come back in January. I have no idea what I'll write about in the next week or so, but rest assured there will be new ideas generated and a special project being revealed pretty soon, so there should be quite a bit to write about. My idea book will never be far away, so there will be lots of new stuff to think through.