music, therapy, and me

It is the start of the most difficult time of the year - Halloween week. Oh my goodness, there is so much excitement happening that you can cut it with a knife at my job. Kids are so excited. Staff are so excited. I am less than excited, but that's an entirely different post. From now until Winter break, we will all be in a state of emotion more than rational thought. Some of my clients will get to visit family members at least once during these months. Some of my clients will not. There will be lots of emotional outbursts, and there will be some hurt feelings. Excitement and anger will be around in equal helpings, and some of my clients will cycle between those emotions in seconds. I am already exhausted. So, what do you do when groups are full of hyper-emotional kids? You go back to the very basics of musicking. For the next several months, my therapeutic focus will be emotional catharsis and safe expression. We will do some of the things that people do during holiday seasons, bu...

I think I may be officially sick now. I am dreaming, remembering my dreams, and dreaming about putting together file folder activities for my clients. These things don't happen usually - most of the time, I don't remember my dreams at all - but the topic of my dreams doesn't really surprise me. I've been thinking about file folders lots and lots, and apparently my brain continues to think about them while I am sleeping. This is my last official day of break (I've never counted weekends as vacation time), and I have made some progress towards my goals. Specifically, I can now walk from point A to point B on vacuumed carpet. Things are not put all away, but I have made progress there as well. My mother may be coming for a visit, so my cleaning and clearing will be accelerated if she does indeed brave the wilds of Kansas in August. I will need a place for her to sleep, so things will have to leave. I also accomplished lots of professional goals this past week. I st...

I admit it. I have a rhythm notation block that I have not really been able to practice out of my repertoire in all my years of taking dictation and writing songs. For some reason, rhythm notation is my downfall when I am composing. I can't tell if what I've written is actually what I am thinking until I hear it again. Unfortunately, if you are interested in writing music, you need to be able to notate rhythm as well as melody lines, harmonic figures, and other elements of music. For years, I've written music down and then given it to competent musicians to play. I then hear what I've written and have to change things because what they play is not what I want. The best thing that happened to me was the advent of music notation programs! Over the years, I've used all sorts of music notation programs, including Cakewalk (which I LOVED!), SheetMusic Notation (another one I LOVED!), and Finale's Printmusic (which I am learning and don't find as intuiti...

Today is the start of the 2017-2018 school year. Kids come to class and to sessions starting today. I've had to deal with teacher complaints about their schedules (talk to others, not to me!) and assisted in reassigning four out of twelve group assignments (that will cause some consternation today, I am SURE!). In the music therapy room, we are going to do some rhythm work this week. As I have mentioned before, music therapy tends to be the only place where my students have positive experiences in a music environment. This is usually because my students don't participate easily in general music education as most music educators know how to engage. Add in the fact that most of my students do not understand many of the concepts of music education (seriously, why do we call that a quarter note?) and the additional fact that they have serious behavior responses when they are not engaged, and most music educators just cannot work with my students. So, many of them come to their fi...

Happy Sunday! It's time to talk visual aids, and here are the ones that I'm using this upcoming week. It's notation week in my clinic, so we are going to work on rhythm notation by using these pieces to explore patterns.  Here's how we're going to use them this week.  If you look over the Supplemental Sunday posts from the past, you'll see that I've referenced using boxes in music therapy group treatment. We used the boxes for the first time this week, and they worked as I expected them to work. Kids were able to complete tasks - some with assistance, others independently. Our opening check-in took less time (initial purpose), and I had the opportunity to assess whether my clients could complete the particular task. This week, we will also be using the boxes to help us organize. I will sort the rhythm wheel pieces out so there are enough pieces for 3 entire rhythm wheels. My clients will use the pieces however they want to use them. I will try to k...

For the last couple of weeks, we've been engaging some of our groups in a very simple therapeutic music experience (TME). We've been using the wooden rhythm instruments and following a play and pass pattern. We establish how many beats we will play and how many beats we will pass. We then set a rhythmic pattern on the keyboard and start our pattern. We play, and then we pass, and we make an entire circle until we end up with the instrument we started with. Then, keeping the beat going on the keyboard, we process. Did we have enough time to play? To pass? How should we adapt the experience? Should we change the number of beats? Or the tempo? This has been a very successful TME for my groups - the small ones as well as the older ones It amazes me how getting back to the very basic of basics, AKA rhythm/tempo, can transform a group of individuals into a group that functions as one. The act of entrainment is a simple one, but without entrainment, a group of people doesn't w...

Yesterday was another music therapy moment. The same group of kids as the last one with several significant differences... One student was entirely out of control. He was showing signs and symptoms of tardive dyskinesia - strange facial expressions, uncontrollable behavior, physical twitches and tics, loud speech, and random comments. I asked if there had been any changes in his medication, and, yes indeed there had been. He was wild - not aggressive, but not able to focus on anything! This is the same kid who has been sitting with his head down when he feels that he is not getting what everyone else is getting. Everyone else was behaving in a typical way, but they couldn't really engage in a normal manner since this kid was so out of control. So, what to do? I went to my go-to elements of music, rhythm and tempo! The first song seemed to work in a mediocre manner, but the second was the one that changed the group dynamic. On Fridays, I do theme-based sessions that aren...