TME Tuesday: When the Music Therapist is the Only Music Educator Around

This week is Instrument Week in my music therapy room. I am the only music therapist at my facility right now, and I am also the only music educator that my students have at the moment. I am also the only musician that some of my clients ever come across in their education, so I take a bit of time to teach them a little bit about music most months.

We are talking about Brass instruments this month. When I was an undergraduate student, we had to take all the methods classes, so I know how to produce sounds on every instrument that there is. That's about it - I can only produce sounds, but I know enough to know that particular fact. The brass family, though, is my home base.

I am a cornetist. I have been since I was 11 years old, and I was in band and jazz band all the way through school. When I went to college, I decided to focus on vocal performance rather than brass due to the hours of marching band requirements for most of the people who played trumpet. I no longer wanted to be out in the fields, hour after hour, marching around. So, I stopped playing my cornet.

I would like to do more playing, but I am group-shy. These days, I am spending most of my time away from groups of people. So, these weeks of instrument demonstration are about as much playing as I do.

For the last three years, I haven't shared many instruments with my students. I decided to bring back our instrument exploration because of the change in COVID status around the world. Brass instruments are the easiest to clean out of all the aerophones, so we are all trying out the brass instruments this week.

We have a three-part cleaning system. We start by placing the mouthpieces in a hot water soap mixture. I allow it to soak for at least 30 seconds before swishing it around so the soap gets into all the tubes. After that, I remove it and place it in an alcohol-hot water soak. After that soak is finished, I rinse the mouthpieces, dry them with a towel, and let the next student use the mouthpiece. It works to ensure that things are clean and sanitized - just like we used to do with our mess kits when camping.

Most of my clients are able to produce sounds on the instruments - well, once we get the point across that we put our lips ON the mouthpiece, not AROUND the mouthpiece. They enjoy making rude fart noises into the mouthpieces without being corrected to use polite sounds. Many of my clients prefer the trombone to the trumpet, but that's okay with me. I prefer the trumpet, of course!!

So, as a music therapist who is doing some of the work of music educators (I have two degrees in music education, by the way), I find it interesting that most of my students have never touched a brass instrument. My kids have never been asked to play an instrument. Many of them have had difficult times in general music education, so they do not get the same sort of experience that I had in music classes growing up. I try to bridge a bit of the gap.

I don't often know what sort of life experience my clients will go to once they leave my facility. I don't know if they will have access to a music therapist or a music class that will welcome them. Part of my therapeutic music experience for instrument exploration is to provide opportunities to explore before throwing lots of information at the client. Since most of my clients have difficulty with the abstractions that are present in music, I chip away at those topic areas very slowly. Every experience that I provide for my clients is rooted in music therapy goals and objectives, but music education fits within those goals and objectives quite nicely.

This week is all about brass instruments. We are listening to the Dallas Brass as our background music as we are waiting for mouthpieces. We are looking at my books about instruments to learn more information about horns and how they became the modern instruments that we have now. We are also playing the instruments - that is the most memorable part of it all.

I want to bring my cornet out of the place I've put it...which means that I have no idea where I put it since my move... One of the benefits of house living is that I can now sing and play my instruments with only one neighbor who might hear me. I have several doors, two stories, and a thick wall between me and my only neighbors now. I am no longer sharing four surface areas with four different neighbors. Hallelujah!

It is time to get started with my therapy day. Five groups and one individual today - the other individual refused to be safe yesterday in group, so no individual today. Tomorrow is a usual day, and Thursday is an interrupted day - one group gone a field trip and one group preempted by an assembly - Mr. Stinky Feet is coming to my facility!! Friday will be a regular day and so will Monday. After that, music therapy becomes sporadic as we coast into the end of the Spring school session. I am looking forward to that week and to the short break that comes after next Thursday. It is almost here...