music, therapy, and me

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 post was actually ready last week, but I had a migraine so working on the computer was completely out! I am getting myself back into the habit of reading research and making clinical inferences for my own clinical practice. For this week, I chose an article from the Music Therapy Perspectives , volume 34, number 2, published in 2016. Michael Viega wrote an account describing Hip Hop as a musical genre as well as a culture and a way of thinking about the world. (The full citation is at the beginning of the R-I Worksheet contained in this post.) The article gave me a glimpse into parts of Hip Hop that I have never really considered or even been aware of during my time working with adolescents. There are significant differences between the terms, hip-hop, Hip Hop, and Hiphop. Read these definitions on page 138. Here is my worksheet model. Article Reference: Viega, M. (2016). Exploring the discourse in Hip Hop and implications for music therapy practice. Music Therapy P...

This is a (semi) new series of blog posts that are designed to get me back in the habit of reading about my chosen profession. I am hoping that reading a bit more regularly will get me back into thinking more deeply about what I am doing with my professional life. It also gives me some structure, which I know that I crave and which allows me to explore my creativity. Welcome to the first post. I'm not exactly sure how I will settle into writing about these texts and articles that I read, but I can tell you a bit about how I start. When I read music therapy texts, I keep a stack of post-it notes next to me. If something makes me think, I write it down (along with a reference of where to find it again) and stick it on a page of my notebook. I use one color of post-its for quotations, another for definitions, yet another for things to investigate further, and one more color for random thoughts or synthesis - for those "A-ha" moments. Once I have finished the articl...

Forgive this self-indulgent post, but I am finally in a place where I can afford to do things like purchase guitar, banjo, and ukulele strings without trading that purchase with food to eat during the month. I just bought all the accoutrements necessary to maintain the various instruments that I have available but haven't been able to get because of medical bills and student loan payments. I am currently unencumbered by such debts, so I have a bit to spend. It's amazing that it doesn't take much to keep up my instruments, but it is difficult to get nothing from nothing. As a result, I have one clarinet reed left, a banjo with only two strings, a flute without an end cap and missing some springs, and a trombone slide that sticks halfway down. Most of those things only required a couple of dollars to fix, and so I am going to fix it right now (while I have the money!). I am needing to immerse myself in making music. I want to better my functional skills on my accompanying...

There is always a moment, on these Sundays, when I sit at the keyboard and just stare. I'm never really sure what to write about, so I simply stare for some time. Then, my mind starts to wander and something eventually occurs to me. Today is no exception. I'm sitting here, letting my mind wander, and all of a sudden I see the Beginning Guitar Superbook sitting on my bookshelf. What could I do with that? Hmmm. I am a functional guitarist. I can chord with the best of them, change my strum and style, and transpose almost everything that's put in front of me. I am NOT a lead guitarist at all! I have to concentrate so very hard to play melodies on the guitar that it takes up all of my brain power. It's difficult for me to focus on doing therapy when I am trying so hard to put my fingers in the right places on the fingerboard, so I often use my voice for the melody and use the guitar simply as an accompanying instrument. I play the piano at the early service where I w...

I am going to be spending some time this week researching a new client population. I have an important conversation about music therapy in a different form later this week, and I need to refresh my ideas about music as a therapeutic medium for people other than those I work with primarily. This is exciting and somewhat daunting as well. When I am tasked with these types of discussions and "performances," I find my path through the information in my textbooks and my journals. Fortunately, I believe that music therapy is not something that dictates only one way. What do I mean by that? Ooh. It is difficult to explain, but important to explain as well.  Here's what I think I mean. A music therapist who is centered in how elements of music can affect human physiology, psychology, and behavior can adapt the tool (music) to accommodate differences in each client. Sure, there are specific protocols that have been developed and researched, but a sophisticated music therap...

My home is a mess. I am simply letting you know this because I am now able to focus on what my environment looks like as I'm sitting here looking around. After the hype of the Online Conference for Music Therapy (OCMT), I have a chance to simply sit and see what's going on. Now it is time to do some things around my house and to focus on other things other than coordinating presenters and attendees.  Now I am starting to look around for something to do in the 45 minutes before I leave for work. I guess I can start with the to-do list. Here are the things that really need to be done - dishes...laundry...planning...reading...cooking...thinking...spending time sleeping...planning for next year... The list goes on and on and on. Let's just focus on the concrete tasks for today. I have to go to Physical Therapy tonight, so I won't be up for doing lots of things later this evening. Maybe I should focus on loading the dishwasher tonight as my chore. Getting that done would...

Yesterday, I did something I haven't done in a really long time (alert - this is the shameful secret that I don't admit often). I opened the most recent Journal of Music Therapy . Can you believe it? I actually opened it up, but that's not all. I actually started to read it!! I don't read much research and feel that most of it doesn't really do anything for me as a clinician. That's such a center of shame for me as I usually put the unopened journals on the journal shelf without even looking to see what is in them. (Shame!) Now, before I opened this edition, I had a plan in place. I was going to work on a project that I've been thinking about for a long time, trying to translate the research being done into my clinical practice. This is something that I don't think we do well for our clinical folks - making the research something that is very relevant to each of us who live in the day-to-day trenches of music therapy treatment. There should be a link...

I am getting ready for a performance on my cornet in about a month. Now, I haven't played my cornet on a regular basis for several years (let's try since college), but I do play every so often and my lip is in pretty good shape. This task is a labor of love for a family at the church where I work. There is a young man who plays the trumpet who is willing to do special music, and his mom asked if I would play with him. I agreed. So, now I need to get into the habit of daily practice. When I was just learning how to play the cornet, I was required to practice every night after dinner. I looked on it as a chore some days, but others gave me pleasure. I learned to play in those after-dinner practice sessions. When I went to college, cornet-playing was frowned upon in the dorms, and I switched my musical focus to voice, so my nightly routine changed significantly. I've found that everything that I love is the result of daily practice. Writing? My challenge this month is to...