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.