“Do you know that song, All About that Bass?” How to respond to a client who asks this? I knew it, but didn’t really know it. Also, the sound world of a highly produced pop song like this is hard to reproduce with the resources in a music therapy session. So we can explore the meaning of the fantasy (wanting to be a pop star, wishing for magical musical competence), we can try to find a way of recreating the song (getting hold of a recording, or the sheet music, or the chords and lyrics) or it could be interpreted as a test of the therapist’s limitations. Part of what is implied by the question is a desire to make music together by finding common ground. Is there a song we both know which we could do? Where is our shared culture? For young children we have a repertoire of songs and nursery rhymes which are widely used, at least within the UK. When you’re a parent you pick a lot of these up, or are reminded of them from your own childhood: The Wheels on the Bus, Wind the Bobbin Up, Old MacDonald Had a Farm and so on. Some of these date back many generations. They may even be the closest thing we have to a shared folk music. But once children get past 5 years old we start to run out of material. For people with a church background this can become the source for shared musical culture, but otherwise our musical experiences are becoming increasingly disparate. There’s no guarantee that two randomly chosen people will know the same songs as each other.
Except at Christmas! Literally everybody knows Jingle Bells. You’d also stand a good chance with Silent Night, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, White Christmas, and Oh Come, All Ye Faithful. For a few short weeks most people in the country have a shared musical world (and in the town too). Some of these songs are religious in content, but many aren’t. Some are beautiful pieces of music, some are bits of kitsch. But they are probably the most widely known songs in the English speaking world. In a session last week a boy asked me to play Rudolph… while he played along on a drum. This moment of clear musical structure and predictability gave us one of our most musically connected moments. I occasionally wonder what music therapy is like in cultures with a strong living folk music tradition, where collective music-making is more a part of people’s day-to-day lives, and perhaps Christmas gives us a taste of this. That blast from the past, having a sing-song around a piano, does still happen at Christmas. In the Bleak Midwinter rubs shoulders with Winter Wonderland. Group musical cohesion, containment, structured play, even elements of improvisation when the alcohol kicks in – it’s all there. And it produces results, livening up the party at the very least, and maybe even changing the way people feel about being in each other’s company. Then in January the songs are lost for another year and singing together in that spontaneous way becomes less possible again.
Friday, 19 December 2014
Monday, 8 December 2014
Music makes you feel better
Well obviously not. It’s clearly not as simple as that. But there is something about this idea that can sneak into music therapy. Certainly perceptions of MT from outside might go along with this – “It must be so rewarding”, or referrals which tell us how much a child enjoys music. And of course music can make you feel better. I had a gig not long ago which caused me to think about this. It was a jazz trio in a bar. Not much money, but some interested listeners, free beer, and a nice meal thrown in half way through. We played entirely music by Cole Porter, who is one of my favourite song writers. It was very enjoyable. The nice environment didn’t hurt. The opportunity to pay exactly the music I like, validating all the years of hard work learning how to play jazz, without too much pressure, but with some positive attention from a friendly audience, made a great combination. We had a lovely evening. After the gig I hung around and chatted to a few people, friends who had come along. I still felt good, which was related to the music. People told me they had enjoyed it, which boosted my ego. I didn’t feel as good as when I’d been actually playing though. There was some feeling of loss already. Then I had to get into my car and drive home. This was ok. The next day I felt sad. No jazz gigs in the diary for a while. I was already mourning the loss of the experience. So did the experience, overall, make me feel better? I don’t think so. What it did was reconnect me with something important and remind me that I need more of it. It made me feel more rather than better.
I did an assessment session recently with a boy who had a diagnosis of ASD and a history of trauma. He was an amazing drummer. And by that I don’t just mean he was a good drummer, I mean that I was actually amazed. After 10 minutes of playing the piano with him and becoming increasingly aware of his strong time feel I switched to saxophone. He stopped playing and shifted the groove into a slower tempo, with a very groovy shuffle feel, as if he’d played with saxophone players before, and he knew what sounded good with the instrument. This has never happened to me before in a session to quite such a marked degree. It raised a lot of questions. Was the music helping him in some way? His verbal communication was limited, making it difficult to get his non-musical perspective, but clearly his musical motivation was strong. But how did he feel when the music stopped? Did the positive effect so apparent during the session extend beyond the immediate experience? The natural assumption is that his high level of musicality is an indication that this is a good referral to music therapy, but it might also be possible that he doesn’t need it. He can already use music and it doesn’t require fostering or facilitating. Maybe he just needs a band to be in. Or – an even more pessimistic point of view – he can do music, but it doesn’t really help him. It’s just something he feels compelled to do.
I don’t think that last one is true by the way, but in the absence of certainty it remains a possibility. It’s certainly plausible that after playing he feels a bit like I did in the car on the way back from my gig – just ok. Our emotional response to music is unpredictable. Ever put your favourite piece of music on the stereo and it have no effect at all? Ever been surprisingly affected by a piece you’d heard a million times, but then experienced differently in a new context? Music can shake things up, alter perspective, reset your emotional responsiveness - sometimes. What it doesn’t always do is make you feel good. Therapy, of course, can actually trigger negative emotions, which can make it hard to want to go, even for people who are strongly motivated, but the temptation to evoke the music in music therapy as the positive bit, the ‘selling point’, leads to shaky ground. “Enjoy your session” is something I often hear from a parent or teacher when I collect a child for their session. “We’ll see”, I think to myself.
I did an assessment session recently with a boy who had a diagnosis of ASD and a history of trauma. He was an amazing drummer. And by that I don’t just mean he was a good drummer, I mean that I was actually amazed. After 10 minutes of playing the piano with him and becoming increasingly aware of his strong time feel I switched to saxophone. He stopped playing and shifted the groove into a slower tempo, with a very groovy shuffle feel, as if he’d played with saxophone players before, and he knew what sounded good with the instrument. This has never happened to me before in a session to quite such a marked degree. It raised a lot of questions. Was the music helping him in some way? His verbal communication was limited, making it difficult to get his non-musical perspective, but clearly his musical motivation was strong. But how did he feel when the music stopped? Did the positive effect so apparent during the session extend beyond the immediate experience? The natural assumption is that his high level of musicality is an indication that this is a good referral to music therapy, but it might also be possible that he doesn’t need it. He can already use music and it doesn’t require fostering or facilitating. Maybe he just needs a band to be in. Or – an even more pessimistic point of view – he can do music, but it doesn’t really help him. It’s just something he feels compelled to do.
I don’t think that last one is true by the way, but in the absence of certainty it remains a possibility. It’s certainly plausible that after playing he feels a bit like I did in the car on the way back from my gig – just ok. Our emotional response to music is unpredictable. Ever put your favourite piece of music on the stereo and it have no effect at all? Ever been surprisingly affected by a piece you’d heard a million times, but then experienced differently in a new context? Music can shake things up, alter perspective, reset your emotional responsiveness - sometimes. What it doesn’t always do is make you feel good. Therapy, of course, can actually trigger negative emotions, which can make it hard to want to go, even for people who are strongly motivated, but the temptation to evoke the music in music therapy as the positive bit, the ‘selling point’, leads to shaky ground. “Enjoy your session” is something I often hear from a parent or teacher when I collect a child for their session. “We’ll see”, I think to myself.
Monday, 1 December 2014
To play or not to play?
Music is a medium for communication. We know this. In my experience, there is an emphasis amongst music therapists on the specific significance of musical interaction. Many of the audio or video examples played in lectures and presentations are of moments which take place between a therapist and the client, in which both are musically involved. Comparisons between music therapy and mother-infant communication, influenced in particular by Daniel Stern’s concept of ‘affect attunement’, have contributed to this.
But music is not always used in this way. In one session a 7 year-old (who is largely non-verbal) spent a good part of the session trying to work something out at the piano. She had a strong motivation to do this and would gesture to me to stop whenever I tried to play. I found myself thinking that this was a valid therapeutic way to use the session. She knew I was there, so I was supporting her with my presence, much as I might support my daughter by sitting with her while she does her homework. Interacting in such a situation might be unhelpful or even undermining. Some therapists might formulate this type of behaviour in terms of resistiveness or defensiveness, a need for control, or perhaps describe it as parallel play (extending the mother-infant analogy), and they might be right on the money. But there can be an adult feeling about it, a ‘don’t interrupt me while I’m doing the crossword’ quality. So this is about flexibility within a relationship which is about more than just music. The therapist is being asked to hold onto the possibility of music in the future while the client works something out. This is in fact a normal musical activity. It’s called ‘practice’. Why do we practice our instruments? One reason is in order to prepare for future musical engagement. In a therapy session the client might be intimating that they’re not content with the musical vocabulary they have available and would like us to wait while they work up some new stuff. Why not?
The hippest thing you can do is not play at all. Just listen.
Lennie Tristano
There’s another possibility too. I like playing the piano on my own, especially playing jazz standards. If another musician joined in halfway through Stardust, and didn’t know the chord changes, or couldn’t play in time, that would be a drag. Or as the trumpet player Ruby Braff reputedly said – “you have to be a really good drummer to be better than no drummer”. Maybe a client in a music therapy session can just be enjoying playing alone. Maybe (the stark truth) they don’t want us to play because we’re not cutting it according to their idea of what the music should sound like. This needn’t be defensive or controlling, it might be a musically motivated decision. It might be both of course, but the possibility remains that we are not playing in the right way according to the client. ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’, and sometimes the wrong music is just the wrong music. Perhaps it’s important to acknowledge our blind spots. We are more comfortable in some styles, and in some musical situations, than others. Might it sometimes be best to just ‘shut up and listen’? This would still communicate something; that the client’s music is worth listening to, and that we have something to learn from them.
I’d be interested to know of other therapists’ experiences of not playing. Do we have a tendency to feel – ‘Playing together good; not playing together bad’? While music therapy differs from talking therapies in that it encourages the possibility of therapist and client making sound at the same time, might there be more of a place for the model of listening therapist and (musically) active client?
Leading Note – October 2012
But music is not always used in this way. In one session a 7 year-old (who is largely non-verbal) spent a good part of the session trying to work something out at the piano. She had a strong motivation to do this and would gesture to me to stop whenever I tried to play. I found myself thinking that this was a valid therapeutic way to use the session. She knew I was there, so I was supporting her with my presence, much as I might support my daughter by sitting with her while she does her homework. Interacting in such a situation might be unhelpful or even undermining. Some therapists might formulate this type of behaviour in terms of resistiveness or defensiveness, a need for control, or perhaps describe it as parallel play (extending the mother-infant analogy), and they might be right on the money. But there can be an adult feeling about it, a ‘don’t interrupt me while I’m doing the crossword’ quality. So this is about flexibility within a relationship which is about more than just music. The therapist is being asked to hold onto the possibility of music in the future while the client works something out. This is in fact a normal musical activity. It’s called ‘practice’. Why do we practice our instruments? One reason is in order to prepare for future musical engagement. In a therapy session the client might be intimating that they’re not content with the musical vocabulary they have available and would like us to wait while they work up some new stuff. Why not?
The hippest thing you can do is not play at all. Just listen.
Lennie Tristano
There’s another possibility too. I like playing the piano on my own, especially playing jazz standards. If another musician joined in halfway through Stardust, and didn’t know the chord changes, or couldn’t play in time, that would be a drag. Or as the trumpet player Ruby Braff reputedly said – “you have to be a really good drummer to be better than no drummer”. Maybe a client in a music therapy session can just be enjoying playing alone. Maybe (the stark truth) they don’t want us to play because we’re not cutting it according to their idea of what the music should sound like. This needn’t be defensive or controlling, it might be a musically motivated decision. It might be both of course, but the possibility remains that we are not playing in the right way according to the client. ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’, and sometimes the wrong music is just the wrong music. Perhaps it’s important to acknowledge our blind spots. We are more comfortable in some styles, and in some musical situations, than others. Might it sometimes be best to just ‘shut up and listen’? This would still communicate something; that the client’s music is worth listening to, and that we have something to learn from them.
I’d be interested to know of other therapists’ experiences of not playing. Do we have a tendency to feel – ‘Playing together good; not playing together bad’? While music therapy differs from talking therapies in that it encourages the possibility of therapist and client making sound at the same time, might there be more of a place for the model of listening therapist and (musically) active client?
Leading Note – October 2012
Music Therapy and evidence of efficacy – some open questions
Recently I watched an interview with the comedian Stewart Lee in which he discussed the economic difficulties faced by small theatres and music venues. The interviewer made the point that it was important to keep these venues open because they often provide a starting place for material that might go on to become successful in the West End. Without these small venues providing a space for new material, commercial opportunities would be lost. A similar argument has been made, for example, about the now defunct UK Film Council, which funded, for example, the highly commercially (and artistically) successful The King’s Speech. Stewart Lee, instead of agreeing, as perhaps the interviewer expected him to do, made what I think is a compelling counter-argument. If we argue for the funding of small venues on this basis, then we are implicitly conceding an argument about the true purpose behind art. We are saying that ultimately, it is only commercial worth that counts. In fact the real reason that small venues should be funded is because they provide a forum for material which has no further commercial potential whatsoever, but is nevertheless artistically worthwhile. He gave an amusing example of an avant-garde balloon act at Bush Hall which had no chance of ever “transferring to the West End”.
Music therapy, along with other therapies, faces a similar dilemma. It’s not a perfect analogy but it has similarities. Do we argue an outcomes-based case for our service that says that ‘evidence shows that clients coming to music therapy often make progress in these areas: behaviour, social communication, affect regulation etc. etc.’ or do we ‘come clean’. By this I mean that we admit that we cannot establish any clear causal link between music therapy and generalised outcomes. Music therapy is so individualised an activity that to suggest it might achieve this or that for a certain client group is at best speculation. If we try to base the case for music therapy on this type of medical-model evaluation of efficacy then are we on shaky ground? Are we, stretching the analogy, focusing too hard on the ‘West End transfer’ when we should be concentrating our efforts on the artistic content of the show?
Some time ago, in an instrumental teaching job I do, I was asked to produce a set of targets, including week-to-week planned activities for the term. To me, along with other members of the teaching team, this was patently absurd. How can you plan a set of activities when what you do is entirely dependent on what your pupil is capable of? Not only what they are capable of, but how much practise they are able, or feel motivated to do, which tunes it turns out they like, what other musical experiences inspire them in the meantime, and so on? Of course we did it. We all fudged it, producing sets of fictional planned outcomes which we secretly knew would have little bearing on or relation to real events as they were to unfold. I suppose we felt our jobs might be at stake.
How much less predictable is music therapy? With instrumental teaching there are in fact broadly definable and measurable aims. We can test students on their knowledge of scales or their developing sense of rhythm, for example (although how far you can really test musicality is also open to debate). Planning a term of lessons in advance might be pointless, but we can assess in retrospect whether a student has made good progress, and indeed, over time, whether a teacher is doing a good job. With music therapy, even when outcomes are excellent, there’s actually no way of demonstrating with certainty that this is a result of therapy. Fortunately, we are not yet being asked to ‘plan’ sessions, although we might outline aims.
However, let’s say a child starts behaving better in class after twenty music therapy sessions. Does this mean the therapy is helping? We all know that as therapists we can make no such claim. However what do we say to the SENCo? We accept credit when it is afforded us, perhaps, taking a “You win some, you lose some” approach. Or perhaps, being conscientious we say something like “That’s good to hear, and it may be that music therapy has contributed to this, but of course we can’t be certain”. The important question is, if we can’t confidently make direct causal links between music therapy and ‘good’ outcomes, what can we do to justify our interventions? What place does music therapy have in (to coin Lord Sugar’s phrase) ‘the current climate’? What ‘good’ does it do?
The answer to this question perhaps lies in that currently much ignored and discredited area – human experience. Everyone has a relationship to music. This is a fundamental tenet of music therapy, that we all innately musical. Ask any human being what they think life would be like if they had to do without music and they would nearly all say that it would be worse, and not just a bit worse. Intuitively we know that those that said otherwise would be (to coin another phrase) ‘in denial’. Listening to music makes you feel good, in a good way, in a way that feels healthy and nurturing. Playing music involves people in a beneficial creative process that connects them to their fellow human beings on a deep level of shared experience. It involves giving and receiving at the same time and is an expression of our humanity which, while we may not be able to put it into words very effectively, we all understand. There is no culture on earth that has no music. It’s a universal human activity.
Where people are in emotional distress of one kind or another music therapy can help them to reconnect with this shared experience of humanity. Music therapists are trained to facilitate this in various ways. We’re trained to attune to each person. We don’t respond to diagnosis, because we’re not doctors. We’re not even a bit like doctors, despite our use of the word ‘clinical’. But we are trained to understand the needs of the individual (and we don’t ignore diagnosis).
The auditors of our society are in the ascendant in the ‘current climate’, with its emphasis on ‘outcomes’ and numerical data. Unfortunately for us, you can’t measure the outcomes of musical interaction in any way that does justice to the actual experience. There may be some benefit from before-and-after studies, questionnaires, client feedback scores and so on, after all, if 50 clients attend music therapy and 45 of them show marked improvements in some aspect of their lives then this need not be ignored, but if we base our case for music therapy too strongly on data we may be missing the point. I don’t think many people would find this a controversial statement, but I think it’s worth reminding ourselves of this when we feel the pressure to come up with ‘good numbers’.
Because musical experience is so hard to put into words, even subjective accounts are unreliable. But is there more scope for appealing to the humanity of the decision makers, because a lot of them have an iPod, go to concerts, listen to the radio, play in a rock band, or sing in choirs? They know what music means to them. Human beings are all musicians, but some can forget sometimes.
(Leading Note - October 2011)
Music therapy, along with other therapies, faces a similar dilemma. It’s not a perfect analogy but it has similarities. Do we argue an outcomes-based case for our service that says that ‘evidence shows that clients coming to music therapy often make progress in these areas: behaviour, social communication, affect regulation etc. etc.’ or do we ‘come clean’. By this I mean that we admit that we cannot establish any clear causal link between music therapy and generalised outcomes. Music therapy is so individualised an activity that to suggest it might achieve this or that for a certain client group is at best speculation. If we try to base the case for music therapy on this type of medical-model evaluation of efficacy then are we on shaky ground? Are we, stretching the analogy, focusing too hard on the ‘West End transfer’ when we should be concentrating our efforts on the artistic content of the show?
Some time ago, in an instrumental teaching job I do, I was asked to produce a set of targets, including week-to-week planned activities for the term. To me, along with other members of the teaching team, this was patently absurd. How can you plan a set of activities when what you do is entirely dependent on what your pupil is capable of? Not only what they are capable of, but how much practise they are able, or feel motivated to do, which tunes it turns out they like, what other musical experiences inspire them in the meantime, and so on? Of course we did it. We all fudged it, producing sets of fictional planned outcomes which we secretly knew would have little bearing on or relation to real events as they were to unfold. I suppose we felt our jobs might be at stake.
How much less predictable is music therapy? With instrumental teaching there are in fact broadly definable and measurable aims. We can test students on their knowledge of scales or their developing sense of rhythm, for example (although how far you can really test musicality is also open to debate). Planning a term of lessons in advance might be pointless, but we can assess in retrospect whether a student has made good progress, and indeed, over time, whether a teacher is doing a good job. With music therapy, even when outcomes are excellent, there’s actually no way of demonstrating with certainty that this is a result of therapy. Fortunately, we are not yet being asked to ‘plan’ sessions, although we might outline aims.
However, let’s say a child starts behaving better in class after twenty music therapy sessions. Does this mean the therapy is helping? We all know that as therapists we can make no such claim. However what do we say to the SENCo? We accept credit when it is afforded us, perhaps, taking a “You win some, you lose some” approach. Or perhaps, being conscientious we say something like “That’s good to hear, and it may be that music therapy has contributed to this, but of course we can’t be certain”. The important question is, if we can’t confidently make direct causal links between music therapy and ‘good’ outcomes, what can we do to justify our interventions? What place does music therapy have in (to coin Lord Sugar’s phrase) ‘the current climate’? What ‘good’ does it do?
The answer to this question perhaps lies in that currently much ignored and discredited area – human experience. Everyone has a relationship to music. This is a fundamental tenet of music therapy, that we all innately musical. Ask any human being what they think life would be like if they had to do without music and they would nearly all say that it would be worse, and not just a bit worse. Intuitively we know that those that said otherwise would be (to coin another phrase) ‘in denial’. Listening to music makes you feel good, in a good way, in a way that feels healthy and nurturing. Playing music involves people in a beneficial creative process that connects them to their fellow human beings on a deep level of shared experience. It involves giving and receiving at the same time and is an expression of our humanity which, while we may not be able to put it into words very effectively, we all understand. There is no culture on earth that has no music. It’s a universal human activity.
Where people are in emotional distress of one kind or another music therapy can help them to reconnect with this shared experience of humanity. Music therapists are trained to facilitate this in various ways. We’re trained to attune to each person. We don’t respond to diagnosis, because we’re not doctors. We’re not even a bit like doctors, despite our use of the word ‘clinical’. But we are trained to understand the needs of the individual (and we don’t ignore diagnosis).
The auditors of our society are in the ascendant in the ‘current climate’, with its emphasis on ‘outcomes’ and numerical data. Unfortunately for us, you can’t measure the outcomes of musical interaction in any way that does justice to the actual experience. There may be some benefit from before-and-after studies, questionnaires, client feedback scores and so on, after all, if 50 clients attend music therapy and 45 of them show marked improvements in some aspect of their lives then this need not be ignored, but if we base our case for music therapy too strongly on data we may be missing the point. I don’t think many people would find this a controversial statement, but I think it’s worth reminding ourselves of this when we feel the pressure to come up with ‘good numbers’.
Because musical experience is so hard to put into words, even subjective accounts are unreliable. But is there more scope for appealing to the humanity of the decision makers, because a lot of them have an iPod, go to concerts, listen to the radio, play in a rock band, or sing in choirs? They know what music means to them. Human beings are all musicians, but some can forget sometimes.
(Leading Note - October 2011)
Singing in the shower
Here’s a true story that might ring bells for any other music therapists working in schools, and perhaps other settings too.
A while ago I wrote a report for a child and handed it to the class teacher. It had this paragraph in it:
"When his teacher suggested that he show me a song that he’d made up, he didn’t want to do this in his therapy session. I suspect that his relationship to the concept of musical performance is complex. While he enjoys the process of creation, he is not always amenable to this being witnessed by others and I have endeavoured to respect this." I later said, "it should also be noted that there are private aspects to his music, that music for him is not always associated with performance".
The first thing the teacher said when I saw him the following week was "Could you work on something in your session for a performance?"
There is a strong association in most people’s minds between music and performance. It is one of the ‘performing arts’. This is an issue that music therapists have to grapple with both in sessions and outside. It is being addressed directly by the Community Music Therapy movement through the assertion that music taking place in more public arenas can, in certain circumstances, still be described as ‘music therapy’. It can also come up in sessions as a fantasy, as the client, for example, imagines themselves as a ‘rock star’ playing to a huge admiring audience, or conversely, when the client is unable to play because they feel they are ‘not good enough’, or that they simply ‘can’t play’ an instrument. Music, even in the intimate context of an individual therapy session, can produce performance anxiety. This is often food for thought about what this might be representing. What is the client really afraid of?
This ambivalent relationship with the idea of musical performance is not confined to music therapy of course. In a way, the X-Factor phenomenon could be seen as a way of people distancing themselves from the possibility of musical exposure. We’d rather watch other people doing it, and be their judge, than participate ourselves. There is a hunger for the extremes, either those people who are so incompetent and deluded that we can ridicule them, or those who are far enough beyond the norm that they can become, temporarily, objects of adoration. We support them in the same way we support football teams or Andy Murray. This conveniently allows us to project the inadequate, hated parts of ourselves onto the deluded losers in the early rounds and to idealise the successes (but we can quickly switch allegiance).
But where does most music making really happen? The overwhelming majority of music is played in informal situations, where performance per se is secondary or absent. Most playing of instruments happens in the home. Ostensibly this might be in preparation for performance, perhaps a specific performance, perhaps a vague idea of performance at some point in the future. I had a conversation with another musician recently. We were rehearsing for a gig at a jazz club. I reflected that actually, practising at home is sometimes more fun than doing gigs. His reply – “It’s always a lot more fun”. This from a professional musician, supposedly someone who has realised the ambition of expressing himself to an admiring audience, but who has found the reality wanting. In performance, we are required to live up to expectations, to meet the audience’s needs, sometimes at the expense of our own. In fact jazz musicians have found their own solutions to this problem. A lot of jazz gets played in musicians’ houses away from the critical and demanding ears of an audience, and not always in the context of rehearsal, but often that of playing for its own sake. Even in a performance context, the audience is often seen to come second. Jazz jam sessions are conversations or sometimes competitions between musicians, on which the audience eavesdrops. So while we might perceive public performance as the most important goal of our musical striving, it might not be the most fun part, and there’s a big question mark about whether it’s why we choose to be, and remain, musicians. Here’s Bill Evans:
“Perhaps it’s a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience”.
Perhaps it’s not so much a “peculiarity” as a very common phenomenon.
In The Adolescent Psyche (I am grateful to Steve Cobbett for drawing my attention to this book) Richard Frankel talks about adolescents’ need to “stay hidden”. Adolescence is a time of identity crisis, what Erikson refers to as ‘moratorium’, when the young person may not wish to share the disturbing twists and turns their psyche might be taking. Music can come in very useful here, because it allows the expression of unexplainable affects and wellings up without the need for verbal explanation. Attempts to make sense of the music, to decipher its meaning, may lead into therapeutic dead ends, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. In contrast, it is also when young people are encouraged to get out into the world, to develop their capacity for performance in a variety of guises. Musically it might be when people begin to gain competence on an instrument and to identify with a specific tradition or style. Others may witness the competence of their peers and decide to withdraw. “I can never play as well as that, so I’ll define myself as a non-musician”. In music therapy we can re-examine some of these assumptions. What is musical validity? What is good music? What is a musician? Does making music have to be linked to musical performance? Reminding people that it doesn’t might be an important part of our role. It’s ok just to play. From a Winnicottian perspective, this might be about the boundaries of the potential space. Some people aren’t ready for it to extend into a public arena. They may never be, and this is ok.
I was in a meeting in school attended by various members of staff along with a year 6 child who I am working with and his mother. It was my moment to speak about our work. I made some basic comments about the therapy and how long we might expect to continue. Then I said that it might be worth thinking about other circumstances in which he could participate musically, perhaps by looking for opportunities outside school, such as music centres. An LSA talked about his musical talent and backed me up. He said that people need to have good teaching to learn music. The boy’s response was “I can learn music on my own”. He was quite vehement about this, despite being surrounded by adults. He was right too. Many great musicians are self taught. But I think he was saying more than this. He was reminding me that his music therapy is a private thing for him, that by making this suggestion about extending musical opportunities I was poking my nose in where it wasn’t wanted. “My music is my own. Mind your own business”, he was saying, to all of us. I think we have to respect this. Music, like poetry and painting, is entitled at times to be a private art form.
I was once asked to speak to some new secondary school students about music therapy – “Just talk to them for 5 minutes”. I asked, on a show of hands, who among the group of about 15 young people considered themselves to be a musician. 3 or 4 put their hands up. Then I asked them who sings in the shower…
A while ago I wrote a report for a child and handed it to the class teacher. It had this paragraph in it:
"When his teacher suggested that he show me a song that he’d made up, he didn’t want to do this in his therapy session. I suspect that his relationship to the concept of musical performance is complex. While he enjoys the process of creation, he is not always amenable to this being witnessed by others and I have endeavoured to respect this." I later said, "it should also be noted that there are private aspects to his music, that music for him is not always associated with performance".
The first thing the teacher said when I saw him the following week was "Could you work on something in your session for a performance?"
There is a strong association in most people’s minds between music and performance. It is one of the ‘performing arts’. This is an issue that music therapists have to grapple with both in sessions and outside. It is being addressed directly by the Community Music Therapy movement through the assertion that music taking place in more public arenas can, in certain circumstances, still be described as ‘music therapy’. It can also come up in sessions as a fantasy, as the client, for example, imagines themselves as a ‘rock star’ playing to a huge admiring audience, or conversely, when the client is unable to play because they feel they are ‘not good enough’, or that they simply ‘can’t play’ an instrument. Music, even in the intimate context of an individual therapy session, can produce performance anxiety. This is often food for thought about what this might be representing. What is the client really afraid of?
This ambivalent relationship with the idea of musical performance is not confined to music therapy of course. In a way, the X-Factor phenomenon could be seen as a way of people distancing themselves from the possibility of musical exposure. We’d rather watch other people doing it, and be their judge, than participate ourselves. There is a hunger for the extremes, either those people who are so incompetent and deluded that we can ridicule them, or those who are far enough beyond the norm that they can become, temporarily, objects of adoration. We support them in the same way we support football teams or Andy Murray. This conveniently allows us to project the inadequate, hated parts of ourselves onto the deluded losers in the early rounds and to idealise the successes (but we can quickly switch allegiance).
But where does most music making really happen? The overwhelming majority of music is played in informal situations, where performance per se is secondary or absent. Most playing of instruments happens in the home. Ostensibly this might be in preparation for performance, perhaps a specific performance, perhaps a vague idea of performance at some point in the future. I had a conversation with another musician recently. We were rehearsing for a gig at a jazz club. I reflected that actually, practising at home is sometimes more fun than doing gigs. His reply – “It’s always a lot more fun”. This from a professional musician, supposedly someone who has realised the ambition of expressing himself to an admiring audience, but who has found the reality wanting. In performance, we are required to live up to expectations, to meet the audience’s needs, sometimes at the expense of our own. In fact jazz musicians have found their own solutions to this problem. A lot of jazz gets played in musicians’ houses away from the critical and demanding ears of an audience, and not always in the context of rehearsal, but often that of playing for its own sake. Even in a performance context, the audience is often seen to come second. Jazz jam sessions are conversations or sometimes competitions between musicians, on which the audience eavesdrops. So while we might perceive public performance as the most important goal of our musical striving, it might not be the most fun part, and there’s a big question mark about whether it’s why we choose to be, and remain, musicians. Here’s Bill Evans:
“Perhaps it’s a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience”.
Perhaps it’s not so much a “peculiarity” as a very common phenomenon.
In The Adolescent Psyche (I am grateful to Steve Cobbett for drawing my attention to this book) Richard Frankel talks about adolescents’ need to “stay hidden”. Adolescence is a time of identity crisis, what Erikson refers to as ‘moratorium’, when the young person may not wish to share the disturbing twists and turns their psyche might be taking. Music can come in very useful here, because it allows the expression of unexplainable affects and wellings up without the need for verbal explanation. Attempts to make sense of the music, to decipher its meaning, may lead into therapeutic dead ends, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. In contrast, it is also when young people are encouraged to get out into the world, to develop their capacity for performance in a variety of guises. Musically it might be when people begin to gain competence on an instrument and to identify with a specific tradition or style. Others may witness the competence of their peers and decide to withdraw. “I can never play as well as that, so I’ll define myself as a non-musician”. In music therapy we can re-examine some of these assumptions. What is musical validity? What is good music? What is a musician? Does making music have to be linked to musical performance? Reminding people that it doesn’t might be an important part of our role. It’s ok just to play. From a Winnicottian perspective, this might be about the boundaries of the potential space. Some people aren’t ready for it to extend into a public arena. They may never be, and this is ok.
I was in a meeting in school attended by various members of staff along with a year 6 child who I am working with and his mother. It was my moment to speak about our work. I made some basic comments about the therapy and how long we might expect to continue. Then I said that it might be worth thinking about other circumstances in which he could participate musically, perhaps by looking for opportunities outside school, such as music centres. An LSA talked about his musical talent and backed me up. He said that people need to have good teaching to learn music. The boy’s response was “I can learn music on my own”. He was quite vehement about this, despite being surrounded by adults. He was right too. Many great musicians are self taught. But I think he was saying more than this. He was reminding me that his music therapy is a private thing for him, that by making this suggestion about extending musical opportunities I was poking my nose in where it wasn’t wanted. “My music is my own. Mind your own business”, he was saying, to all of us. I think we have to respect this. Music, like poetry and painting, is entitled at times to be a private art form.
I was once asked to speak to some new secondary school students about music therapy – “Just talk to them for 5 minutes”. I asked, on a show of hands, who among the group of about 15 young people considered themselves to be a musician. 3 or 4 put their hands up. Then I asked them who sings in the shower…
Monday, 14 July 2014
Music machine
‘Shared music': Here’s a thought experiment that might be of interest to music therapists. The intention is to facilitate thought and discussion about what ‘shared music’ really is. It’s something I’ve often pondered, both from a music therapy perspective and as a jazz player. I also suspect that ‘shared music’ is a concept that is often used by music therapists as if everyone knows what it means. I’m not sure that I do. When we play music with other people, we often have the experience of feeling connected, as though we are inhabiting an alternative reality together. But could this be illusory? Music is after all a subjective experience. ‘Shared music’ sounds suspiciously like an objective concept. Look at it this way…
Imagine there was a machine that could improvise music. It could not only improvise, but respond sensitively and interestingly to other music. Now imagine that you were in a room playing music with a partition between you and the machine. Nobody told you about the machine, you simply heard the music it produced. Would you be able to tell that it wasn’t a real person making the music with you?
"This is moot point as such a machine is impossible anyway." Perhaps, but let’s pretend it is possible. The point of the exercise is to think about what it is about musical interaction that is human and which parts are ‘merely musical sound’. This is an important question for music therapists. Also there are lots of musical machines around now (auto-tune, samplers, loop pedals), even cheap and widely available ones, that would have been hard to imagine some years ago.
"Even if such a machine could be invented, it would be so complex that it would be easier for a real person to do the job anyway." This is an interesting one. In fact this is an issue that has been around for a while with regard to recorded music. The fact is that a lot of records which people enjoy are, to some degree, created by machines. The musical content may have been invented by a human, but the performance is electronic. Is this music necessarily ‘worse’ than music played on ‘real instruments’? The issue of improvisation and responsiveness complicates the issue, as a machine that can respond musically has to be a lot cleverer than one that simply follows a set of instructions, but it’s not impossible to imagine. However it is a valid objection in the ‘real world’. Studios still employ live musicians today, despite all of the advanced technology available, because there are some things that humans can still do better than machines. But this is a thought experiment and doesn’t have to take place in the real world.
"A machine, no matter how clever, could never achieve the subtlety of a live musician." This is perhaps getting near the crux of the matter. Maybe there are aspects of performance that are so subtle that we are not even fully conscious of hearing them, but which are nevertheless crucial to the ‘humanity’ of the music. Perhaps the tiniest of imperfections, perhaps subtle events that could never be anticipated are what differentiates human from machine. Perhaps there are musical things that only a real live person could ever produce which a machine, because of its essential ‘machine-ness’, could not. But then if this is the case, what are they? Because this is another important question for music therapists. It may be that the real question is ‘What frame of mind do we have to be in so that these essential human characteristics will happen as a matter of course?’ This is probably the approach that most music therapists, and indeed improvising musicians of any kind, take. Perhaps there might be a danger of being machine-like if we don’t get into this frame of mind. It’s also possible that a really great musician will always musically out-empathise a machine, just as a great chess grand master might beat the most powerful computer (though the machines have triumphed in that particular battle). However this might allow for a grey area where a lesser, even very good musician, or a great musician on an off-day, might not make the grade. Might they then be hard to tell from the machine? Or is it actually something essential that any musician, even an average one, possesses that differentiates them? Still we’re allowing for an imperfect machine with this reply. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend the machine is as responsive and inventive as the greatest musician who ever lived.
"There is something about the presence of a real person in the room, even if unseen, that is crucial to the musical interaction, some sense of another presence that, although not overtly part of the music, is vital to the experience of shared improvisation." This may well be true. Instinctively, I like this response. It allows for the possibility of this wonder-machine, but side-steps the issue. Basically, this is saying that there may be something almost mystical about the presence of another person in the room. Is this something that can be heard in the music? If not, how can you really tell whether the music is human or machine? Perhaps you can ‘feel’ the person’s ‘aura’. This answer is both irrefutable and also impossible to prove (unless we really had the machine to do the experiment).
"If you could invent such a machine, you couldn’t really tell the difference, but this is missing the point as shared music making involves other modes of simultaneous communication in order to be a fulfilling experience. The partition is the problem, as to be able to feel the musical connection you also need other ingredients such as eye contact, awareness of facial expressions and body movements, even extraneous noises like key rattles or intakes of breath." So perhaps musical connection cannot really be separated, particularly in a therapeutic context, from the whole experience of being in a room with someone else doing stuff. Maybe such a machine would be musically indistinguishable from a real person, but so what? It’s not just the music we’re interested in here, it’s the ‘whole experience’, which could mean many different things. Music itself is perhaps only part of the experience of making music with a person.
"When you improvise music with another person, you can just feel it. It’s a shared experience and that’s something that can’t be explained." Maybe this is the most honest answer. Unfortunately it doesn’t identify the essential musical ingredient(s) that separate this shared experience from the machine experience.
"Well maybe they’ll have been conned someone into believing they’ve been playing with a real person. They’ll be disappointed when the truth is revealed." So could there be something retrospective about shared musical experience? Could the reaction of the other musician, however small (jazz musicians getting together to play will often just nod after a tune, but that can be enough to say ‘I heard you’), be vital to the ‘shared-ness’. Anyone who’s ever done a background piano gig will testify to how dispiriting it can be to play to zero audience reaction. Even a single punter applauding out of pity can lift the spirits immeasurably, take it from me! So again we come back to the non-musical ingredients which can hold up a mirror to the shared music.
"If such a machine existed, it would be as good as a real musician. Let me know when you’ve invented one." Is this machine like ‘zombies’ in consciousness theory (hypothetical beings who behave exactly as we do, but have no self awareness)? You can imagine it, but even if it did exist, what’s the difference? The experience of the person playing would be the same with the machine as it would be with another person, but so what? The machine is emulating human characteristics perfectly, so the question we should really be asking is ‘what are those human musical characteristics?’ The question about ‘shared musical experience’ remains. Does it really exist, or can we only look at two separate experiences? Does ‘shared musical experience’ seem to imply an imaginary third party who is witnessing the sharing?
Afterthought: In my actual practice as a music therapist I believe I do experience connection to most clients through the music, but there remains something mysterious about this, and there are some who cause me to doubt the connection. We never know for sure what this ‘shared musical experience’ is like for the client. We work with at best partial knowledge, our own instincts and suppositions. Some clients tell us about the experience, but this is never really enough, and of course some can’t. Nothing is certain.
Imagine there was a machine that could improvise music. It could not only improvise, but respond sensitively and interestingly to other music. Now imagine that you were in a room playing music with a partition between you and the machine. Nobody told you about the machine, you simply heard the music it produced. Would you be able to tell that it wasn’t a real person making the music with you?
"This is moot point as such a machine is impossible anyway." Perhaps, but let’s pretend it is possible. The point of the exercise is to think about what it is about musical interaction that is human and which parts are ‘merely musical sound’. This is an important question for music therapists. Also there are lots of musical machines around now (auto-tune, samplers, loop pedals), even cheap and widely available ones, that would have been hard to imagine some years ago.
"Even if such a machine could be invented, it would be so complex that it would be easier for a real person to do the job anyway." This is an interesting one. In fact this is an issue that has been around for a while with regard to recorded music. The fact is that a lot of records which people enjoy are, to some degree, created by machines. The musical content may have been invented by a human, but the performance is electronic. Is this music necessarily ‘worse’ than music played on ‘real instruments’? The issue of improvisation and responsiveness complicates the issue, as a machine that can respond musically has to be a lot cleverer than one that simply follows a set of instructions, but it’s not impossible to imagine. However it is a valid objection in the ‘real world’. Studios still employ live musicians today, despite all of the advanced technology available, because there are some things that humans can still do better than machines. But this is a thought experiment and doesn’t have to take place in the real world.
"A machine, no matter how clever, could never achieve the subtlety of a live musician." This is perhaps getting near the crux of the matter. Maybe there are aspects of performance that are so subtle that we are not even fully conscious of hearing them, but which are nevertheless crucial to the ‘humanity’ of the music. Perhaps the tiniest of imperfections, perhaps subtle events that could never be anticipated are what differentiates human from machine. Perhaps there are musical things that only a real live person could ever produce which a machine, because of its essential ‘machine-ness’, could not. But then if this is the case, what are they? Because this is another important question for music therapists. It may be that the real question is ‘What frame of mind do we have to be in so that these essential human characteristics will happen as a matter of course?’ This is probably the approach that most music therapists, and indeed improvising musicians of any kind, take. Perhaps there might be a danger of being machine-like if we don’t get into this frame of mind. It’s also possible that a really great musician will always musically out-empathise a machine, just as a great chess grand master might beat the most powerful computer (though the machines have triumphed in that particular battle). However this might allow for a grey area where a lesser, even very good musician, or a great musician on an off-day, might not make the grade. Might they then be hard to tell from the machine? Or is it actually something essential that any musician, even an average one, possesses that differentiates them? Still we’re allowing for an imperfect machine with this reply. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend the machine is as responsive and inventive as the greatest musician who ever lived.
"There is something about the presence of a real person in the room, even if unseen, that is crucial to the musical interaction, some sense of another presence that, although not overtly part of the music, is vital to the experience of shared improvisation." This may well be true. Instinctively, I like this response. It allows for the possibility of this wonder-machine, but side-steps the issue. Basically, this is saying that there may be something almost mystical about the presence of another person in the room. Is this something that can be heard in the music? If not, how can you really tell whether the music is human or machine? Perhaps you can ‘feel’ the person’s ‘aura’. This answer is both irrefutable and also impossible to prove (unless we really had the machine to do the experiment).
"If you could invent such a machine, you couldn’t really tell the difference, but this is missing the point as shared music making involves other modes of simultaneous communication in order to be a fulfilling experience. The partition is the problem, as to be able to feel the musical connection you also need other ingredients such as eye contact, awareness of facial expressions and body movements, even extraneous noises like key rattles or intakes of breath." So perhaps musical connection cannot really be separated, particularly in a therapeutic context, from the whole experience of being in a room with someone else doing stuff. Maybe such a machine would be musically indistinguishable from a real person, but so what? It’s not just the music we’re interested in here, it’s the ‘whole experience’, which could mean many different things. Music itself is perhaps only part of the experience of making music with a person.
"When you improvise music with another person, you can just feel it. It’s a shared experience and that’s something that can’t be explained." Maybe this is the most honest answer. Unfortunately it doesn’t identify the essential musical ingredient(s) that separate this shared experience from the machine experience.
"Well maybe they’ll have been conned someone into believing they’ve been playing with a real person. They’ll be disappointed when the truth is revealed." So could there be something retrospective about shared musical experience? Could the reaction of the other musician, however small (jazz musicians getting together to play will often just nod after a tune, but that can be enough to say ‘I heard you’), be vital to the ‘shared-ness’. Anyone who’s ever done a background piano gig will testify to how dispiriting it can be to play to zero audience reaction. Even a single punter applauding out of pity can lift the spirits immeasurably, take it from me! So again we come back to the non-musical ingredients which can hold up a mirror to the shared music.
"If such a machine existed, it would be as good as a real musician. Let me know when you’ve invented one." Is this machine like ‘zombies’ in consciousness theory (hypothetical beings who behave exactly as we do, but have no self awareness)? You can imagine it, but even if it did exist, what’s the difference? The experience of the person playing would be the same with the machine as it would be with another person, but so what? The machine is emulating human characteristics perfectly, so the question we should really be asking is ‘what are those human musical characteristics?’ The question about ‘shared musical experience’ remains. Does it really exist, or can we only look at two separate experiences? Does ‘shared musical experience’ seem to imply an imaginary third party who is witnessing the sharing?
Afterthought: In my actual practice as a music therapist I believe I do experience connection to most clients through the music, but there remains something mysterious about this, and there are some who cause me to doubt the connection. We never know for sure what this ‘shared musical experience’ is like for the client. We work with at best partial knowledge, our own instincts and suppositions. Some clients tell us about the experience, but this is never really enough, and of course some can’t. Nothing is certain.
Benign Noodling
Knowing when not to play is an important preoccupation for me as a music therapist, and as an improvising musician. The client in a music therapy session needs to feel that there is space for them to play. It’s a fine balance, though, because sometimes they need some active music from me to get things moving. There can be times when I’ll think to myself – ‘Nothing’s happening. Let’s see what happens if I do this...’ and often the results are surprising. In one session a child who was playing tentatively, with no clear pulse, began to play the drums with a strong groove once I introduced a regular pattern on the piano. Was I pushing them away from their own music into something of mine, imposing my agenda? I don’t think so. It felt more like I was opening a door, and they were choosing to walk through it. The music felt genuinely enlivened and positive and this was reflected in the child’s comments afterwards.
I’m in the habit of trying to find psychodynamic formulations for things that happen in music therapy. I know there’s a long running argument that says you don’t need to do this, that music can be therapeutic on its own terms, but I think it helps me to avoid taking certain things for granted. For example, if I make some music with a client in a session and it feels good, I’ll try to think about why this is. Is it for the right reasons? Because it might be that the music feeling good just shows that I’ve successfully imposed my own music, and the client is being compliant, identifying with my projection. It’s worth at least considering this possibility. Perhaps psychodynamic thinking is partly about not entirely trusting your instincts, but taking the time to question your unconscious motives. It’s difficult though, because this could equally stymie a healthily developing musical relationship. I might over-think. And part of the trick with improvisation is to learn to trust yourself, to feel rather than think your way through the music. Hopefully a lot of the thinking has been done before, during the long process of developing competency on an instrument and finding a voice of your own. So when thinking about music therapy, there’s an interplay between thought and feeling. The process for me goes something like: have a feeling about the music, think about what it means, test the thoughts by experiencing how they feel, get back with the flow. This process can take place within very short spaces of time, seconds even, or can be part of the longer process of therapy, including reflection in supervision.
Sometimes a client will spend some time just fiddling around on an instrument, with no particular feeling of direction or development. Electric guitars seem to stimulate this for some reason. There’s a fascination with the sound that you can get with very little effort. Twang the strings with the distortion turned up and it sounds pretty cool. There can be quite long periods of time during which the pure enjoyment of this cause-and-effect sends the client into a kind of trance, staring into space as they pluck the strings and feel the vibration coming from the amplifier. A ‘psychic retreat’ perhaps? Using the music to create distance between the client and the world? Perhaps this is the ‘doubling of the self’ described by Mahns in Analytical Music Therapy, the rock guitar equivalent of whistling in the dark. Whatever, I feel like I don’t want to interrupt. The client disappears into the experience of the moment and it’s time for me to disappear too. Or maybe I’ll do some aimless noodling of my own at the piano or the drum kit, but nothing that gets in the way too much. Music is supposed to mean something, traditionally, but sometimes a bit of meaningless meandering has an important function. For a little while, nothing matters. The music therapy space becomes an empty space. These are either moments in which nothing is being achieved, or possibly they are the most important moments in therapy, but I’m not sure which. Nothing is being achieved – the double meaning is striking. If therapy is a space to take a break from the expectations of the outside world and just be, at least some of the time, then nothing might be quite an achievement.
I’m in the habit of trying to find psychodynamic formulations for things that happen in music therapy. I know there’s a long running argument that says you don’t need to do this, that music can be therapeutic on its own terms, but I think it helps me to avoid taking certain things for granted. For example, if I make some music with a client in a session and it feels good, I’ll try to think about why this is. Is it for the right reasons? Because it might be that the music feeling good just shows that I’ve successfully imposed my own music, and the client is being compliant, identifying with my projection. It’s worth at least considering this possibility. Perhaps psychodynamic thinking is partly about not entirely trusting your instincts, but taking the time to question your unconscious motives. It’s difficult though, because this could equally stymie a healthily developing musical relationship. I might over-think. And part of the trick with improvisation is to learn to trust yourself, to feel rather than think your way through the music. Hopefully a lot of the thinking has been done before, during the long process of developing competency on an instrument and finding a voice of your own. So when thinking about music therapy, there’s an interplay between thought and feeling. The process for me goes something like: have a feeling about the music, think about what it means, test the thoughts by experiencing how they feel, get back with the flow. This process can take place within very short spaces of time, seconds even, or can be part of the longer process of therapy, including reflection in supervision.
Sometimes a client will spend some time just fiddling around on an instrument, with no particular feeling of direction or development. Electric guitars seem to stimulate this for some reason. There’s a fascination with the sound that you can get with very little effort. Twang the strings with the distortion turned up and it sounds pretty cool. There can be quite long periods of time during which the pure enjoyment of this cause-and-effect sends the client into a kind of trance, staring into space as they pluck the strings and feel the vibration coming from the amplifier. A ‘psychic retreat’ perhaps? Using the music to create distance between the client and the world? Perhaps this is the ‘doubling of the self’ described by Mahns in Analytical Music Therapy, the rock guitar equivalent of whistling in the dark. Whatever, I feel like I don’t want to interrupt. The client disappears into the experience of the moment and it’s time for me to disappear too. Or maybe I’ll do some aimless noodling of my own at the piano or the drum kit, but nothing that gets in the way too much. Music is supposed to mean something, traditionally, but sometimes a bit of meaningless meandering has an important function. For a little while, nothing matters. The music therapy space becomes an empty space. These are either moments in which nothing is being achieved, or possibly they are the most important moments in therapy, but I’m not sure which. Nothing is being achieved – the double meaning is striking. If therapy is a space to take a break from the expectations of the outside world and just be, at least some of the time, then nothing might be quite an achievement.
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