Friday 29 June 2018

Vitamin C

I’ve written before about whether ‘music makes you feel better’. There might, in particular, be something therapeutic about shared music. This might happen in lots of different contexts: community settings, acute wards, closed groups, individual therapy, and so on. While music therapists might argue about how to frame the work, about whether it’s the music itself, or the relationship with the therapist, or unconscious processes being expressed through music, there seems to be some general agreement that music is an important part of the therapeutic process in music therapy, whatever it might be.

I went to a good gig last night. I try to do this as often as possible, but it never feels often enough. Anyway, I really enjoyed it, hearing Simon Purcell with the great alto player Mike Williams at Oliver’s in Greenwich. I’m missing music at the moment, not getting enough time to practice and not doing that many gigs, absorbed in my current research studies, which I’m enjoying in a different way. Research is creative, but in a more cerebral way than making music. One of the questions arising out of the research is about the perceived effects of music therapy sessions. What do parents observe about their children’s response to music therapy? I hope to tell you more about this soon! One idea that has come up in discussions I’ve had with parents in other contexts, which won't be news to music therapists, is that children are often calmer, less anxious, after their music therapy session. This can last a while, sometimes as long as a day or two. This chimes with my own experience of music. I feel better after playing, or after hearing a live performance. This usually lasts for a little while, but never more than a day or two. The experience fades. If I haven’t been to any live music for a while, I begin to lose interest in listening to recorded music, as if the real experience has to be recent enough to bolster the simulation.

So perhaps music is like vitamin C. We need it, but we need it regularly. Our bodies, or our psyches, don’t absorb and retain it, but it’s essential for our well-being that it’s passing through us. This raises some big questions about music therapy, particularly if we are looking for ‘effects’. If the effects of music itself don’t last, but need to be maintained, then what should music therapy look like? Is it more like asthma medication than antibiotics? Is music an essential balm for the chronic aspects of the human condition? If so, we could never expect music therapy to have good results at, say, six-month follow-up, because it would always have worn off by then. It might instead be about clients learning to use music for themselves, to understand their own relationship to music, so that they can return to it and use it in beneficial ways.

There might be another possibility, that it’s not about the music itself, but about music as a facilitator of relationship. Music simulates pre-verbal communication and thus allows human beings to connect with one another at a deeper level than language. This might help to repair attachments, perhaps. The problem with this is that there are lots of ways to form attachments. Music might assist attachment, but it’s definitely not essential to it. And in any case, as Claire Flower pointed out in her podcast interview, what can we achieve in half an hour a week? Children form positive attachments with other people whom they spend a lot of regular time with, over a long time span; parents, siblings, teachers, teaching assistants, friends, maybe therapists (if they see them for long enough). We might have a real dilemma here. Is it about the music? Is it about relationships? Is it about the interaction between the two? Do we have to choose one of these? You might think I’m being too reductive. Perhaps it’s all just ‘a lot more complicated than that’, or it’s about being holistic, rather than fragmenting these aspects of life into different categories. People, music, relationships; these aren’t things that can be separated out and examined independently. Ok. So why is it called ‘music therapy’ then?

Friday 15 June 2018

Thinking about thinking

The great drummer Jon Hiseman has just died. This post isn’t a tribute to him, but I was very sorry to hear of his passing. (Here’s an example of his playing, which is brilliant.) I did meet him once, doing a recording for someone in his studio. I forget the details around this as it was a long time ago, maybe early nineties. What really stayed with me is something that he said during a conversation in the studio. He remarked that the best music is played by people who are thinking about something else entirely, or words to that effect. What I believe he meant was that, when you are doing a gig, if you are having to think about the music in order to get it right, then there might be mistakes, or a feeling of uptightness about it perhaps. It’s when you know the music so well that you can play it while thinking about doing the laundry, or taking the car in for a service, or doing your accounts, that the music really sounds good, really flows. It was a remark that has stayed with me ever since. I actually think about it a lot. I think it disturbed me at the time as it seemed to imply some kind of disconnection, maybe something inauthentic about the performance. I feel differently about it now.

Seeing the news was a moment of synchronicity for me, because I’d just been thinking about this idea in relation to some clinical work. I found myself, in a session, thinking about something else, unrelated to the client or the music. This can feel transgressive. We’re supposed to be paying attention to the client, and to the music, to the ‘shared-musical space’, perhaps. I even wrote about Jon Hiseman in my process notes. Later, after writing this, I saw the news of his death.

This isn’t a post about synchronicity however, although you can have that one too if you like it. What it really got me thinking about was what I think about when I’m playing. I’ve have so many discussions with other musicians and music therapists about this. Some people have said that, when improvising, thought gets in the way. You need to be ‘in the zone’, where you’re not tripping yourself up with concerns about what ‘should’ be happening, where you can be ‘in flow’. The music flows along, and we stay with it, riding it like a wave, trusting the process. As soon as we think, ‘is this right?’ or ‘is this good?’ or ‘what shall we do next?’, we are getting in our own way. Mercédès Pavlicevic talked about the problem of thought in clinical improvisation in her podcast interview, expressing a similar idea. She said it might go something like, ‘Why am I in F sharp?’, and then the moment’s lost. She’ll be missed too, very much.

There may be a difference, of course, between the role of thinking in improvised or in tightly rehearsed music. Jon Hiseman may have been talking about the phenomenon of playing music that’s been well played-in, perhaps where a band is really gelling, some way into a tour. I’ve certainly experienced this. It doesn’t necessarily feel good to the performer. It can feel routine. But for the audience it might be a thrilling experience hearing a band playing really tightly together, giving the impression of total unity, where the individual musicians are just firing neurons within a complex whole that’s not perceived by any one of them as an entity, but by the listeners. You can listen to a recording of a gig you were on and feel like it was someone else playing, because the experience is so different to being part of the process of producing the sound.

While going through the motions might produce a tight performance, could the same be said for improvisation? Well, yes, I think it could. Kenny Werner talks a lot about this a lot in Effortless Mastery. When you let go and just let yourself play without trying to critique or edit, that’s when the best stuff happens. Thought gets in the way. Maybe there are differences between these two phenomena, maybe they are the same, maybe there are overlaps, but it doesn’t matter, because that’s not what concerned me when thinking about what happened in the session.

The question that came to my mind when thinking about my moment of drifting off, of thinking about something else, was, if I’m not thinking about the music, then what am I thinking about? I’m usually thinking about something. I’m not a yogi. This might be worth exploring. It may be that I need to work on my capacity to be in the here-and-now. Perhaps all music therapists should practise meditation in order to work on this, to enter a more thoughtless, mindful state. Probably not a bad idea. I don’t think it’s the answer though. I think the process of thinking, getting in the way of the music, being with the client some of the time, attuning, failing to attune, drifting off, playing good music or bad music, I think it’s all the process. The idea that we are attentive to the client, and that we are sharing in the musical process together, connecting in the music, is nonsense, or, at least, it’s not realistic. We are in some kind of music-making process with the client, and the two of us are failing to connect with each other in one way or another. We might be trying to connect, but we’re never going to make it, because our experiences will always be different. Even when the music comes together, it’s coming together in at least two different ways (I’m not going to even try to talk about group work). But this, I hope, is ok. I hope it is, because I’m never going to pay total attention to the client, not for a whole session. I’ll keep trying, but occasionally I’m going to drift off. I wish I hadn’t mentioned ‘doing your accounts’. What was I saying?