Some of the most ‘therapeutic’ musical interactions I’ve witnessed during lockdown are between musicians themselves online. For example, I joined a Facebook group called ‘Tune of the week’ (TOTW). This is about (jazz) musicians showing their working to other musicians. It’s about preserving people’s musical identity at a time when it is facing the challenge of invisibility. Musicians need to be heard, and valued. People need to be heard. There has been a parallel tendency for music therapists to demonstrate their value at this time, to show that music therapy still has something to offer. This is perhaps similarly about preserving identity, but in this case the identity is that of the expert, the person who ‘knows how to use music therapeutically’. I’ve been part of this, interviewing two music therapists from Chiltern Music Therapy who gave expert advice on online interactions. There are also, for example, GIM resources for people with COVID-19, singalong packs produced by Nordoff Robbins music therapists, and online services for health professionals provided by NLMT. Chiltern runs an online group for parents and children. In my face to face work, back in the old world, I felt my work was closer to the ‘Tune of the week’ interactions than to these MT online resources. It was about relationship, and the way music can provide a bridge between people. My therapeutic expertise is partly about being a person with another person, through music (alongside the talking that’s necessary to facilitate it, and the thinking that supports both).
I might be in danger now of being unfair to music therapists promoting the profession, and trying to provide something helpful in a time of crisis. I might be creating a straw man based on an assumption that framing music therapy as a profession of experts who are ‘best placed to use music’ might be about identity but not about relationship, when it can be both. The interventions listed above are all valuable. As music therapists, we should be helping, and reminding people that musical connection is more important now than ever. So this isn’t an attempt to put those things down, more a note-to-self about how music works on a personal level, a reminder not to forget that my therapist-self relies on my musician-self. Inspired by TOTW, I’ve started up a Facebook group for music therapists called ‘Music Therapists’ Music’, for music therapists to share their own music with the group. Let’s see how that goes. I sense some shyness, which is fair enough. Music might be about showing off sometimes. It certainly can be in jazz. But only sometimes. In TOTW musicians are encouraging one another. It includes input from really expert players like Gareth Lockrane, but it’s inclusive. Anyone can put up a video, and talk about their musical challenges. It’s being done in a collegiate spirit. So perhaps one question I have is, as music therapists, can we look after one other? Can we share our musical identities, as a way of shoring up our therapeutic identities? ‘But aren’t they the same thing?’ Perhaps no more than my 'talking identity' would be the same as my therapeutic identity if I were a talking therapist. But, of course, it’s complicated...
As music therapists, we make use of, adapt, and edit our musical identity for each client or group. We use those bits of our musical identity that are useful at the time. But TOTW is a reminder to me of my own need to be heard, which is part of the reason I’m a musician, and so underlies my reasons for being a music therapist. Being a music therapist (in my experience) involves a tension between musician and therapist, but a useful tension, where my awareness of my own musical needs helps me understand what’s happening for the client. If I adopt a stance of ‘expert music therapist’, I might be giving up one kind of performance for another. The interactions on TOTW show musicians exposing their working, their musical struggles, and they show musicians being supportive, encouraging one another, reassuring each other that they are being listened to, and heard. Of course, there's also some showing off, but that's part of the process.
And another thing: RIP the great Lee Konitz, for whom improvising was a way of life, and who was always uncompromising in preserving what he felt was most important about music.
Thursday 23 April 2020
Wednesday 5 February 2020
Playing and Reality
Something has been stopping me from adding to this blog recently. I think I was getting in the habit of trying to say something ‘important’ every time. Meanwhile, I add ideas to an online notebook. There are pages and pages of them, or there would be if it was printed out on A4. So instead, I’m going to put down some thoughts, and see where they lead. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about music and culture. Actually I’m not sure what this means, but I did find that talking to Natasha Thomas on Music Therapy Conversations set me thinking about a lot of stuff. Here’s one question that came to my mind: could a Gnawa musician be a music therapist?
If you aren’t aware of Gnawa music already, maybe you’ve now googled it and found some YouTube clips. There are plenty. I did an ethnomusicology Master’s project on Gnawa music back in the early 90s. I looked at the role of the m’allem in the tradition. In a Lila, which is a night-long ceremony in which ancestral spirits called mluk are evoked and sung to/about, along with dance, the m’allem leads the musicians from the ginbri, a three-stringed bass instrument. He (usually he) also leads call-and-response singing, with the rest of the group singing the responses. It’s a complex and rich tradition which mixes Islam with West African influences.
The ginbri, to my ears, seems to have six notes encompassing one octave. Usually D-E-G-A-C-D. There is some flexibility around the C, I think, which can be more like a B sometimes. The vocal melodies also seem to stay within these pentatonic parameters, for the most part. There are two fundamental rhythms, one using a two-against-three pattern and the other like a lilting 12/8, which can’t be accurately notated because the ‘quavers’ aren’t straight, and seem to flatten out at faster tempos, rather as swing feel in jazz tends to. There’s my etic perception of the music.
In music therapy training in the UK, we tend to encourage musical flexibility, the ability to adapt to different styles, according to the needs of each individual client. What would we do if an experienced Gnawa m’allem enrolled on a training course? Talk about ‘coals to Newcastle’! Gnawa music is a healing tradition. Musicians are tasked with evoking ancestral spirits so that the dancers can reconnect, address problems of health and well-being with the mluk. If a m’allem enrolled on a training, surely they would be doing the tuition?
Or we would be comparing notes, so to speak? In fact, perhaps ironically in the context of this line of thinking, Gnawa musicians are very flexible, open to fusing their music with jazz and other traditions. More prosaically what I wonder about is: can six notes be enough? Clearly they can. Maybe, to make music work with only six notes is the sign of mastery. The fact that I feel like I need all that harmonic colour, the complexities of the well-tempered chromatic system of twelve notes equally spaced in an octave and the capacity to modulate, to play ‘atonally’, to create consonance or dissonance, that’s my stuff. You don’t really need it, not if you’re a true m’allem, which translates roughly as ‘master musician’. Six notes, or five, if you don’t count the octave, with flexibility of intonation, but no modulation. The same as the blues, and no doubt related in its origins.
I imagine a positivist perspective on Gnawa music would posit that the mluk are not ‘real’ and that any healing resulting from a Lila would be a sort of ‘placebo’. But if we adopt a culturally open and curious stance, reality shifts. We might realise that it’s not about that, that we’re looking at it the wrong way to understand it meaningfully. Have a listen to the Paul Nordoff lectures if you can get hold of them. This is a master preaching to his disciples. It’s every bit as culturally specific as the Gnawa tradition. Notes and rhythms are presented as pure communication, capable of reaching all human beings if the timing is right, but it’s all firmly within the classical tradition of major and minor scales, equal temperament, etc. etc. Are we more like the Gnawa, developing our own rituals and beliefs in musical relationship as a route to healing (for example) attachment difficulties, than we are like ‘clinicians’, using music to achieve therapeutic goals in a health context? And if we are, is this a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing?
If you aren’t aware of Gnawa music already, maybe you’ve now googled it and found some YouTube clips. There are plenty. I did an ethnomusicology Master’s project on Gnawa music back in the early 90s. I looked at the role of the m’allem in the tradition. In a Lila, which is a night-long ceremony in which ancestral spirits called mluk are evoked and sung to/about, along with dance, the m’allem leads the musicians from the ginbri, a three-stringed bass instrument. He (usually he) also leads call-and-response singing, with the rest of the group singing the responses. It’s a complex and rich tradition which mixes Islam with West African influences.
The ginbri, to my ears, seems to have six notes encompassing one octave. Usually D-E-G-A-C-D. There is some flexibility around the C, I think, which can be more like a B sometimes. The vocal melodies also seem to stay within these pentatonic parameters, for the most part. There are two fundamental rhythms, one using a two-against-three pattern and the other like a lilting 12/8, which can’t be accurately notated because the ‘quavers’ aren’t straight, and seem to flatten out at faster tempos, rather as swing feel in jazz tends to. There’s my etic perception of the music.
In music therapy training in the UK, we tend to encourage musical flexibility, the ability to adapt to different styles, according to the needs of each individual client. What would we do if an experienced Gnawa m’allem enrolled on a training course? Talk about ‘coals to Newcastle’! Gnawa music is a healing tradition. Musicians are tasked with evoking ancestral spirits so that the dancers can reconnect, address problems of health and well-being with the mluk. If a m’allem enrolled on a training, surely they would be doing the tuition?
Or we would be comparing notes, so to speak? In fact, perhaps ironically in the context of this line of thinking, Gnawa musicians are very flexible, open to fusing their music with jazz and other traditions. More prosaically what I wonder about is: can six notes be enough? Clearly they can. Maybe, to make music work with only six notes is the sign of mastery. The fact that I feel like I need all that harmonic colour, the complexities of the well-tempered chromatic system of twelve notes equally spaced in an octave and the capacity to modulate, to play ‘atonally’, to create consonance or dissonance, that’s my stuff. You don’t really need it, not if you’re a true m’allem, which translates roughly as ‘master musician’. Six notes, or five, if you don’t count the octave, with flexibility of intonation, but no modulation. The same as the blues, and no doubt related in its origins.
I imagine a positivist perspective on Gnawa music would posit that the mluk are not ‘real’ and that any healing resulting from a Lila would be a sort of ‘placebo’. But if we adopt a culturally open and curious stance, reality shifts. We might realise that it’s not about that, that we’re looking at it the wrong way to understand it meaningfully. Have a listen to the Paul Nordoff lectures if you can get hold of them. This is a master preaching to his disciples. It’s every bit as culturally specific as the Gnawa tradition. Notes and rhythms are presented as pure communication, capable of reaching all human beings if the timing is right, but it’s all firmly within the classical tradition of major and minor scales, equal temperament, etc. etc. Are we more like the Gnawa, developing our own rituals and beliefs in musical relationship as a route to healing (for example) attachment difficulties, than we are like ‘clinicians’, using music to achieve therapeutic goals in a health context? And if we are, is this a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)