Music is a medium for communication. We know this. In my experience, there is an emphasis amongst music therapists on the specific significance of musical interaction. Many of the audio or video examples played in lectures and presentations are of moments which take place between a therapist and the client, in which both are musically involved. Comparisons between music therapy and mother-infant communication, influenced in particular by Daniel Stern’s concept of ‘affect attunement’, have contributed to this.
But music is not always used in this way. In one session a 7 year-old (who is largely non-verbal) spent a good part of the session trying to work something out at the piano. She had a strong motivation to do this and would gesture to me to stop whenever I tried to play. I found myself thinking that this was a valid therapeutic way to use the session. She knew I was there, so I was supporting her with my presence, much as I might support my daughter by sitting with her while she does her homework. Interacting in such a situation might be unhelpful or even undermining. Some therapists might formulate this type of behaviour in terms of resistiveness or defensiveness, a need for control, or perhaps describe it as parallel play (extending the mother-infant analogy), and they might be right on the money. But there can be an adult feeling about it, a ‘don’t interrupt me while I’m doing the crossword’ quality. So this is about flexibility within a relationship which is about more than just music. The therapist is being asked to hold onto the possibility of music in the future while the client works something out. This is in fact a normal musical activity. It’s called ‘practice’. Why do we practice our instruments? One reason is in order to prepare for future musical engagement. In a therapy session the client might be intimating that they’re not content with the musical vocabulary they have available and would like us to wait while they work up some new stuff. Why not?
The hippest thing you can do is not play at all. Just listen.
Lennie Tristano
There’s another possibility too. I like playing the piano on my own, especially playing jazz standards. If another musician joined in halfway through Stardust, and didn’t know the chord changes, or couldn’t play in time, that would be a drag. Or as the trumpet player Ruby Braff reputedly said – “you have to be a really good drummer to be better than no drummer”. Maybe a client in a music therapy session can just be enjoying playing alone. Maybe (the stark truth) they don’t want us to play because we’re not cutting it according to their idea of what the music should sound like. This needn’t be defensive or controlling, it might be a musically motivated decision. It might be both of course, but the possibility remains that we are not playing in the right way according to the client. ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’, and sometimes the wrong music is just the wrong music. Perhaps it’s important to acknowledge our blind spots. We are more comfortable in some styles, and in some musical situations, than others. Might it sometimes be best to just ‘shut up and listen’? This would still communicate something; that the client’s music is worth listening to, and that we have something to learn from them.
I’d be interested to know of other therapists’ experiences of not playing. Do we have a tendency to feel – ‘Playing together good; not playing together bad’? While music therapy differs from talking therapies in that it encourages the possibility of therapist and client making sound at the same time, might there be more of a place for the model of listening therapist and (musically) active client?
Leading Note – October 2012
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