music, therapy, and me

Today is a "Nothing" day. I don't have anything on my calendar, so I have designated today as a "Nothing Day." I have nothing that I have to do, just things that I could do if I want to. We will see what happens. This is part of my self-care routine, and something that I have to schedule every so often. A day without responsibility. This is a treat. I think I've finished my committee work for the moment, I have no pressing needs to compose anything, or meetings to attend during the day. This is a treat. Time for napping, laundry, maybe even vacuuming. Even blogging today is something, so I'm going to leave it here and move into my day of "Nothing." I promise I'll think up something good for TME Tuesday while doing nothing else.

It's that time of year again. It is time to sit down and start figuring out my schedule for next school year. We have to start this process in April because the Adapted Physical Educator takes the summers off. This year we have two additional dilemmas to account for ... changes associated with moving into a renovated space and the adoption of a "pod" format in our school. The goal here is to provide teachers with common planning time, so all of us will be seeing kids from the same pod at the same time. This is more challenging than it sounds... The first thing that we are having to deal with is that each of us is used to different session lengths. The PE teacher wants only 30 minutes per class, three times per week. I hate 30 minute sessions since I don't feel that I can get to much therapy stuff. The art therapist seems to feel the same way. The Essential Life Skills teacher wants 30 minute sessions with some kids but not with others. This is a bit of a mess. The...

Yesterday, I was talking to my intern about silly things as we often do late in the afternoon and things got just plain old absurd. I started singing a song - off the top of my head - and just to be silly. My intern asked me if I made up the song. I stated that I had. I used to be outright scared of improvising. My fear stems from Middle School Jazz Band and the "rules of improvisation" that I learned from Mr. Olson. All of the rules would just leave my brain when it was my turn to improvise. I had a panic-induced reaction whenever anyone would tell me to improvise. It was difficult. My internship director, Sheryl L. Kelly, RMT, stopped all of that negativity. One day she challenged me about why I had such strong reactions to being told to improvise. We talked. A bit of cognitive reframing later, I realized that improvisation in the music therapy clinic did not have to mean following all of the rules that Mr. Olson taught me, but that the music just reflected what was...

This week has been a week of song Therapeutic Music Experience (TME) Development. It has been an interesting time as I have been trying to figure out how to put what I do when I'm developing song-based TMEs into a fixed format that is understandable to others. It's more difficult than you would think to actually do that. So, yesterday's post was about taking a song, parsing it out, and then deciding how it can be used in music therapy treatment. I got as far as the parsing of the song, and then had to stop because I didn't have a particular client in mind. So, today I am going to take it into the idea of how to use the song with clients. Hypothetical client #1 - female, 18 years old, labeled as having a non-specified intellectual disability in the mild range of function, presents as very high-functioning (diagnosis of ID/DD is suspected to be false), additional diagnoses of Oppositional-Defiance Disorder, Conduct Disorder, Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder, a...

On Tuesday, I shared a TME Song visual which assists me in completing brainstorming and Therapeutic Music Experience (TME) development. As I was sitting in my house this morning, waiting for the sun to rise (kinda - it's stormy out there), and getting ready for enjoying the rest of my second Spring Break, I thought I would expand on this previous post and go through the process itself here in this post. So, here it goes! Here is the TME graphic in an outline format. My comments are added in green (because I like the color green!).  Start with a Song - Just going to pick up a random songbook here nearby, then flip to a random page... So, the song is... Shenandoah . According to the book that I picked, this is an old sea chantey. Discovering Music Together 4: Teacher's Edition, (1970), states that the song refers "to the story of a white trader who fell in love with the daughter of the Indian chieftain, Shenandoah, and took her across 'the wide Missouri.' "...

Well, here it is TME Tuesday again. I am currently in the middle of my second Spring Break and am not really into thinking about what is going on out there in my particular music therapy world. On the other hand, I am still in general music therapy mode, so here is the beginning of a Song-based Therapeutic Music Experience (TME) decision tree. A few explanations - I am a visual learner. I can remember all types of things if they are presented in a visual format, so I naturally arrange my learning into visuals. I struggled with session and TME development in college until I realized that all my supervisors wanted me to do was write down a flow chart. Then, it just clicked. I've kept this idea with me ever since. Flow charts are something I can understand. So, as an attempt to help out those others out there who think like me, I have made some of these graphic decision trees. Here is the first part. I hope it will help some of you faithful readers to conceptualize how I develop...

One of the things that I like to do is to work with other music therapists doing music therapy things. I often interact with MTs so I can learn more about what we do as a collective (do we sound like the Borg?). What you do as a therapist in your particular environment fascinates me as it is probably COMPLETELY different from what I do as a therapist. As I've been a therapist, I have attended two world congresses. These experiences did a great job of opening my eyes to the differences between not only therapists, but the different philosophical viewpoints of therapists in other countries. I have realized that I approach music therapy in an American-centric manner, definitely influenced by the founders here in the United States. The world congresses of music therapy really opened up my eyes to the fact that there are different views of how music works that are extremely different from my own. The problem that I have found is that congresses are too short and too crammed to really ...