music, therapy, and me

I had plans for myself yesterday - an afternoon without sessions where I could do some more organizing of the spaces that I have upended due to a recent ceiling leak. I had plans that were destroyed by a storm two nights ago and slick roads. My afternoon without sessions changed into business as usual - two sessions in the middle of my afternoon. The same groups will be going on their field trip today, but I will only miss one session and will only get 30 minutes of extra preparation time due to my schedule. Sniff. Sigh. Waaaaah! So, I did my actual job yesterday - all of it. One thing I noticed a long time ago was that plans NEVER go exactly like you think they will. I have always thought of session "plans" as more like "strategies" or "suggestions," and I think it baffled some of my teachers during music therapy school. I remember getting marked down for session implementation when I rearranged the session to accommodate client responses and setting even...

When I am writing music, I tend to do one of two things. I either start with a specific client in mind and write for that client's goals and objectives, or I start with an idea and let the idea grow regardless of the clients that I am serving at the time. I spend time with lots of hypothetical clients - thinking about the vast number of clients and their unique goals as I develop songs and therapeutic music experiences (TMEs). Today, though, I would like to start with the first focus - that of a specific client and his or her or their goals. Currently, I am sharing a wall with a class of students who are experiencing lots of life and school changes. Two students have transferred from residential care to home care and are now day students. One student is brand new to the classroom. Another student recently left the class. All of these changes have shifted the dynamics in the classroom group, and old behaviors of concern have reemerged as well as finding new behaviors to contribute. ...

I want to focus on some fun things, and what better day (especially with the alliteration that I love so much) to focus on fun than on Fridays? I am filling out my blogging schedule with some themes, and this is one that I want to bring back. My word for 2024 is "play." I have been trying to focus on things that bring me joy and fun, so I think I will take Fridays as a day to focus on the things that I find fun in our profession - there are plenty of things that are a natural part of this job that are SO MUCH FUN! Today, I want to talk to you about improvising. (How many of you felt a cold chill up your back when you read the word, "improvising." like I do?) I promise, this is a good thing. I had a jazz band director that made me very afraid of improvising way back in junior high. That fear made me very anxious each and every time anyone told me to improvise in any situation because I was convinced that I could not do it. My internship director, Sheryl Kelly, fixed ...

I am not always comfortable improvising. My jazz band teacher in junior high made me very nervous about making up any sort of solo and my perfectionism sealed the deal with that anxiety. My teacher would bark that it was my turn to improvise, and everything I knew about music and music theory would dribble out of my ears and I would end up crying (well, in seventh grade, I did - I found a backbone in eighth grade). This pattern of panic and loss of knowledge continued until my internship when my internship director gave me the best way of thinking about improvisation in music therapy sessions. "Just match your music to what you see your clients do, and then sing about what is going on."    - Sheryl L. Kelly, RMT-BC When she told me that little bit of reframed information, I felt that it made sense to me and my brain. I could do that. It wasn't rooted in perfection or following someone else's theory rules, it was rooted in my clients. Now, I still don't like jazz i...

This week has already been long, and it is only Tuesday before dawn right now! The thing is, I have lots to do, only 24 hours in each day, and all sorts of things happening at the moment that require some extra attention. I am being dragged from thing to thing with little to no time in between to think about stuff. I am also trying my best to prepare for something coming up soon. In between all the "hurry up and get this done" stuff, I have some time to sit and listen. This time is happening at work since all my other stuff is home-based and personal, so I have my guitar at hand. I have been improvising quite a bit based on the sounds and noises that are going on in the classroom next door. For some reason, my neighbors are in a crisis situation all the time now. So, things are pretty loud next door. This, more than anything else in my job, inspires my need to improvise. I have been singing songs about being a bully (there aren't many of those songs out there) and consequ...

When I was in college, the word, "improvisation" caused my brain to freeze, all of the knowledge that I had of music leak out of my ears, and shot me into a state of high anxiety. I blame Mr. Olson, my junior high band director who would try to make me improvise solos in jazz band, stated that there were so many rules and yet, no rules at all, and didn't understand that I had no idea what I was doing in seventh grade but would ridicule me and the others when we didn't do anything really cohesive. I was not comfortable with the concept of improvisation until I went off to my internship. At my internship, I also struggled with this concept. My internship supervisors, Sheryl, Mary, and Angie, kept encouraging me to break away from a session plan, especially with my individual clients. I was petrified of letting go of the compositions and just finding my way through music. So, I had to figure out what I was doing. My problem? I was all mired down in the music theory of it...

If you have no idea what this title means, then please go check out this link and this one before you start reading this post...These posts will explain my strange acronyms and what's actually happening right now. Some setting information for this particular post - I work 12 months a year in a school for students with various diagnoses. We have a week between the "regular" school year, a week off to cover the Fourth of July, and then a bit under two weeks at the end of our summer session before we start our "regular" school year up again. So, I am back into the pattern and routine of daily music therapy groups. Since I am always working during these summer months, I am continuing my personal "NTM" TME challenge. Yesterday's TME was a lazy one. I led only one group (the other scheduled group for me to lead is a brand new intake room - there weren't any students in the room at the time, so they canceled on my), and I hadn't remembered...

I have a client who is casually musical. Do you have these types of clients? The ones who don't sing with the group, but who burst out with song when in a non-group setting? This client can be led into active musicking in the classroom, in individual sessions, and in relaxed moments. I played around in the classroom the other day when we were waiting for a peer and for a staff member to arrive. I started to sing a simple melody and the client sang it back to me without even seeming to know what was going on. I changed the melody, the client changed the repetition to match my alterations. The client engaged with me outside of the music room and then continued to do that in our individual session yesterday. We were sitting on the carpet, playing the keyboard, and I started singing something that was somewhat related to our conversation - something about the weather - and the client started singing back to me. What came out was "It's raining tacos." We both stopped, ...

I was moving from my session area to my office yesterday after a session that had been a bit challenging, and I was thinking about things as I am wont to do. As ideas and thoughts moved through my head, one of them was that I wasn't really spending much time writing new songs and TMEs lately, but my sessions were full of new music. You see, I've been improvising lots of music lately. It's interesting that I go through periods of time when music is at my fingertips, seems to flow out of me, and then it completely disappears. Other times, the music in my head simply has to be written down. It rarely happens at the same time. I find this pattern to my creativity within the music very interesting. On Monday, I used a song that I often use - Put Your Cough and Your Sneeze in Your Sleeve - and improvised several new verses (I should really update my TME file to include the new verses for later...) about other manners and expectations. My clients seemed to enjoy the first...

I'm tired. I'm sick and tired and want something to change. I don't want to live in fear every time I walk into my school job. I don't want there to be signs on the door that say that we prohibit weapons. I don't want to have to attend active shooter training (which gave me intense and horrible anxiety dreams) in order to learn that there is really nothing that I can do in the case of an active shooter in my school. I am tired of it all. We're told so many conflicting things about situations like the latest in Florida. We get told that it's not the fault of the manufacturers, it's not the fault of the people who make regulatory laws about gun ownership, it's not the fault of such and such. We're told that the person who acted was an individual who chose to take advantage of the loopholes, technicalities, and FREEDOM that we are offered in this country. There will be an assumption that the person who acted was mentally ill, and there will be som...

I am almost finished with reading my current music therapy text. I have one chapter left after this one, and I am looking forward to the end of the book. It has really enriched me and my understanding of improvisation and music therapy. Having said that, I want to share that I had lots of difficulty with understanding and even liking this particular chapter, Psychodynamic meaning in music therapy. Full disclosure here. I am not a psychodynamic music therapist. I was "raised" in a behavioral context as a music therapist, trained as a sensory integrative therapist, and have decided upon humanism as my primary philosophical view. I don't recall anyone ever saying anything mean, inaccurate, or degrading about folks who are psychodynamic or psychoanalytical in nature during my educational processes, but I've never felt comfortable with the entire set up. I went into the chapter, trying very hard to figure out what was being said. I kept getting caught up in the ...

I spent most of the latter half of this week improvising motor therapeutic music experiences (TMEs). I love doing that. I took my guitar, started a chord progression, and let everything develop as it went along. Clients were engaged, everyone was moving, people were tapping their toes and clapping their hands, and I cannot remember a note of what came out of my mouth. Not one note. That always happens with me. I improvise wonderful songs that evaporate immediately. I wish I could remember them, but I've learned over the years that those songs aren't meant to be repeated. They are important for the clients in the moment, but they are meant to be replaced with the next song. Over the years, people have made suggestions about how to keep those songs for posterity - use a recording app, write them down immediately, lots of things - but I just don't worry about it. For one thing, I would have to record every session on the off-chance that I might improvise something ...

I am finally getting back into the swing of things by continuing my practice of reading a music therapy text and then synthesizing it into my world of music therapy. It's been some time since I've done this, so forgive me ahead of time if I stumble a bit. In the interest of full honesty, I must admit that I am concurrently reading, writing, and synthesizing (not what I like to do, but important to get back into my routine). Here we go. I am currently reading Mercedes Pavlicevic's Music Therapy in Context: Music, Meaning and Relationship. I am currently reading Chapter 11, "Playing with Winnicott's Reality." I am not extremely familiar with Winnicott, so I head over to Wikipedia to see what I am getting into... (Did you hear that? Every single academician just shuddered reading that last sentence. "Wikipedia?? That's not an appropriate resource!!" Okay. I know, but I find that Wikipedia does a great job of synthesizing things into brief ove...

It is Sunday again, and it is time to dive into the next chapter of Mercedes Pavlicevic's book, Music Therapy in Context: Music, Meaning and Relationship. Chapter nine, "Music in Dynamic Form and Dynamic Form in Music," begins with the reminder that musicality is innate and emotional in nature. We use sounds to communicate prior to the development of speech, and we learn to adapt sounds to let others know what we want or need. We have those "that's her sleepy cry" moments when we are getting to know infants. "In clinical work,...it is usually the distortion of this innate musicality that is addressed, that points the way towards how the person can be brought towards a state of equilibrium and balanced flexibility, signalling a fully mutual expressive being." (p. 118) Dynamic Form - "the intrinisically organised dynamic forms of emotions which are present from birth and generated in interpersonal relating" (p. 118). So, when I pla...

I found myself back into the writings of Mercedes Pavlicevic this weekend. I finished chapter eight (of thirteen - only five more weeks to go), and, as always, found myself thinking about what I do in a deeper manner. I wonder why I didn't read this book before now. It would have enriched my clinical education so much. Maybe I wasn't in a place to understand it until now. That's what I'm going to believe - I'm reading it when I need it the most. I am enjoying this book. Chapter eight, entitled "Songs without words: Music in communication," addresses how we, as humans, develop our communication skills outside of the musical environment (but with ramifications for music therapists). The majority of the information presented comes to us from infant and infant-mother research and includes articles that are familiar to me from my education in cognitive psychology and human development. I'll be re-investigating my article archive for the names Trevart...

If you are a regular reader of this blog, then you know that I try to synthesize a chapter per week of a music therapy textbook. I will do this by the end of today, but it will be a bit delayed. Chapter seven is starting off to be very interesting, and I want to make sure that I do it full justice. I'll spend time in between church services this morning reading and thinking. There should be a synthesis later this afternoon. UPDATED AFTER I ACTUALLY DID WHAT I SAID I WOULD DO! Chapter seven of Music therapy in context: Music, meaning and relationship is entitled, "Meaning in relationship: The music between. In this chapter, Mercedes Pavlicevic continues the thoughts that she started in Chapter six but goes more in depth about what is happening in music therapy treatment rather than just what happens in music improvisation from a music psychology aspect. She makes a case for music therapy as a unique interpersonal experience that is more than what pathology the client bring...

I jumped the gun a bit last week - if I had only looked at the chapter after this one, I would have found that there was a natural synthesis break, but I didn't look, so I got in an early synthesis post. Never fear, though, I won't take another synthesis break next week. This week is dedicated to Chapter Six: In Concert: Improvisation, Cognition and Music Therapy. I have lots of new people to look up from this chapter - Aldridge, Brandt, Sloboda, Davidson, Howe, Meyer, Ansdell, Pressing, Clarke, Cook, West, Howell, Cross, Brown, Serafine, Hargreaves, Sundberg, Lindstrom, and Lee. This chapter focused on the basics of improvisation from a musical aspect and then from a music therapy aspect - something less tied to music theory and more tied to therapeutic intervention and relationship. I think I finally know why I am so comfortable improvising with my clients and so much less comfortable improvising in jazz band. One of the things that I like about this book is that Ms. ...