“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.
No comments:
Post a Comment