I love being a music therapist.
Right now, between the sessions I'm demonstrating for student music therapists (which they will take over) and the work I'm doing for a local school district, I'm getting daily affirmations in the form of wonderful responses from and interactions with my clients. This week, there were several moments in which the musical connections were as strong as any I experienced as a violinist, even though the children I was interacting with have "severe" disabilities.
For example, I work with a little girl who has cerebral palsy and mental retardation. She's a pip. She can be quite stubborn, and she can resist focused, repetitive work -- but oh, does she love music. Her aide can wheel her in to the room where we have our session and she'll be grumbling and squirming, and then -- when the first guitar strum sounds? Smiles and laughter.
She reaches for everything. I suspect that when she first started doing this, everyone was thrilled because it was initiation and interaction, and because she's good at it -- finding objects all around her and grabbing them. The problem now is that she reaches before she looks, and she reaches when she shouldn't.
She doesn't respond to verbal or physical prompts to keep her hands still; in fact, it sometimes seems to make her reach even more persistently.
But when I sing a song she likes (one of her favorites is "What a Wonderful World"), and I stop suddenly each time she starts to reach for the accompanying picture book, or the guitar, she returns her arms to a resting postion. I don't say anything, I don't touch her -- I just stop playing. After a few moments of silence, she pulls her arms back. Even better, the second time this happens, she only starts to reach and as the music stops, she's already pulling back. The next time? All I have to do is give just a slight rubato at the first sign of reaching, and she relaxes her arm.
It isn't that the music is sedating her so that she's not interested in reaching -- although the gentle rhythm probably helps. No -- she's consciously and deliberately choosing to keep the music going, and enjoying her own control of it. We're both making the music happen.
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This week, a teenager with autism, who comes to the university clinic for music therapy, was in a bad mood. He resists participating in his regular activities when this happens, and it seems like nothing will shake him out of his pout. The one thing that does? A rock 'n' roll improv.
The student music therapist working with him made a great decision when he refused an activity this week; she changed course and invited him to go into the equipment room and choose some instruments. I decided to join the session at that point because I knew the instrumental improv would be more invigorating with three of us. The young man came out of the equipment room with a gong and a slide whistle -- hardly the stuff of rock legends -- but once we got going, with me on the guitar and the student on a large djembe, it didn't matter. What did matter was the form of the music; a four bar pattern with three bars of hard-driving rhythm (I used a I - iii - bVII progression) and a break on the fourth bar for the client's solo.
Here's the thing. There we were, a trio of an acoustic guitar, an African drum, and alternating gong clashes and slide whistle "swooshes." Two musicians, neither on her "best" instrument, and a young man with no significant musical skills. Yet the music we were making for those few minutes was completely satisfying -- as exciting as being deep into, say, the fourth movement of the Schumann piano quintet. And the client? He was beaming; he was a rock star!
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I've just started working with a young woman with autism and mental retardation. She is 20 years old, chronologically, but tests (as well as any of those tests can measure) at around 1 year old, developmentally. I'm seeing her in a small group of four young women in a local high school special education program, though she is the only one who has music therapy on her IEP.
Each of the young women has a para-professional with her, and the "paras" are used to giving lots and lots of cues and prompts and assistance. So when we got started, I had to explain that we were going to try and let the music be the cue; to let the ebb and flow of tempo, changes in volume, and the flow of the songs do the cueing for us.
And today, this girl -- without any cues other than the music -- let me help her play this lovely glockenspiel as I sang, without her usual jerky movements or resistance to touch. She made eye contact more times in thirty minutes than they had seen all week. She began to hum during a song and, when I hummed back, she stopped, looked at me, and said, "oh." She was happy, peaceful, and involved.
So was I!
