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…