The “stuff of life”

"What we play is life, my whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn," Louis Armstrong

There’s an interesting interview with Simon Procter on the Live Music Now website, in which he discusses music therapy as a career choice. Simon, as most of you will be aware, is one of the Directors of Music Services at Nordoff Robbins. In the interview he expounds very eloquently about the kind of things music therapists do, how they might overlap with community musicians, what their special skills are, how they are trained, the kind of people they might work with. It’s very clear, concise and informative, helpful advice for someone who might have had experience of working for Live Music Now as a community musician or performer and is interested in how they might develop their career along a new path, perhaps inspired by their experiences. Not surprisingly he gives the NR training course a bit of a plug. There are other trainings available, but these are easy enough to find online for anyone interested, and he’s in the business of promoting his own course, which seems fair.

Then, in response to the question “How does the NR approach differ from other training courses?”, he says this:

The Nordoff Robbins approach is ‘music-centred’ rather than psychoanalytic or behavioural. We take musicians and teach them to work musically with people. We emphasise musical outcomes for clients: we see music and musical experience as the stuff of life, not just as symbolic of something else.

Here we have two false dichotomies: one is that music therapy must be either ‘music-centred’ or psychoanalytic/behavioural, the other that music is either ‘the stuff of life’ or ‘just symbolic of something else’. Perhaps these are both expressing the same idea in slightly different ways. Procter isn’t here advancing a theory or using the sort of language that is required for an academic article, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too picky. However, he is speaking to prospective music therapy trainees, so it’s important that the language is clear, and not misleading. Of course, ‘music-centred’ is a well-worn phrase in relation to NR, but this doesn’t mean it can’t be challenged (despite the scare quotes).

First, a declaration of personal interest: I went to Guildhall, where I also do some teaching now. Trainees there are also taught how to ‘work musically with people’. As for an ‘emphasis on musical outcomes’, I would say that these are seen as a means to an end, that being the well-being of the client. I strongly doubt that anyone would contest this at NR, at any stage in the history of the institution. Perhaps they might say that musical outcomes and general well-being go hand-in-hand, but surely not that a musical outcome supersedes the client’s well-being. I would also assert that this could happen, having worked in schools where the end product of the school concert does not always take into account the emotional processes of the students, who might very well be put under pressure or stress in order to achieve musical aims. I could also elucidate on the stresses and strains of the professional musician. Involvement with music doesn’t automatically link to wellness.

What does he mean by music being ‘the stuff of life’? Perhaps that music is an intrinsic part of life, a medium that expresses things about being alive, without any need for interpretation or translation into another medium. This seems a fair statement to make, but other things might also be ‘the stuff of life’: human relationships, for example. In which case, psychodynamic processes (leaving behavioural approaches to one side) would also be ‘the stuff of life’, concerned as they are with the development of the individual in relation to others. Being musical would not preclude a thing from being subject to psychodynamic interpretation or understanding. Putting it simply, music could be ‘the stuff of life’ and ‘symbolic of something else’ (as opposed to ‘just…’). Furthermore this focus on being ‘symbolic’ is leaving out quite a bit of psychoanalytic theory as it might apply to music. Attachment theory, Stern’s affect attunement and Winnicott’s theories about play and creativity are not only, or even mainly, about things being ‘symbolic’ of other things. They describe processes of development through relationships, and, as we know, relationships can be expressed musically (would any NR therapist refute that?). One could assert, indeed, that music is relationship, rather than being symbolic of it: the relationship between tones, between rhythms in time, and between the people taking part.

You don’t have to use psychodynamic methods of thinking and interpretation, but they don’t deflect you from a musical focus. There is nothing non-music-centred about psychodynamic thinking as applied to music therapy. Thus, it can be music-centred and psychodynamically informed. Throw out psychodynamic thinking (or behavioural approaches) if you like, but to present it as having a focus which is not music-centred could be misleading, particularly to potential trainees, who might not know much about different approaches, and may also be keen to hold onto their identity as musicians. These sorts of concerns might also be relevant when communicating with people about music therapy in other contexts, such as when discussing it with other professionals or service users. The rhetoric of a phrase like the ‘stuff of life’ attempts to romanticise an approach in a way which seems to be more about obscuration than elucidation. Of course music is the ‘stuff of life’, and so is everything else.

‘God Only Knows’

In my recent blog post I said that “the half-diminished chord in ‘God Only Knows’ is probably not the active ingredient in music therapy”. This got me thinking. Brian Wilson had a complex relationship with his father and, viewed in this light, the words of the song take on an interesting meaning. “God only knows what I’d be without you”. It sounds like a love song at first, but then when you listen to the words in detail it becomes apparent that they don’t quite fit this narrative. The ‘what’ in particular is a surprise. I’ve wondered about this, whether the song is really addressed to a lover, or a parent. Since the lyrics were written by Tony Asher, the idea that this is Brian Wilson addressing his father seems fanciful, but on the other hand, the idea that there could be a love song where there is ambiguity, not only about who is being addressed, but about the nature of the relationship, is an intriguing one. Taken as a work of art removed of context, ‘God Only Knows’ could fit this model. It may be that the ambiguities running through the lyrics, alongside the harmonic ambiguities underpinning it, are what make the song so moving.

The half-diminished chord comes with the line “I'll make you so sure about it". In fact the function of the chord isn’t the usual II-7b5 as it’s a chromatic transitional chord on the #4 of E major, which leads to an A major chord in the next bar. It’s a moment of intensified harmonic ambiguity within a harmonically ambiguous piece of music. If it’s not an example of the “active ingredient” in music therapy, it’s certainly an active ingredient in some sort of process. It has a harmonic and emotional function, albeit one which might be hard to pin down.

I also said in my recent post that “music therapy doesn’t operate within a performer to audience dynamic”. I was thinking of the analogy of therapist with performer and client with audience which often seems to be an assumption made about music therapy. There might be an idea that the therapist is doing something to the client using music. This is not normally what happens in music therapy, but to say that this is ‘incorrect’ would be to oversimplify. Since the therapeutic process is two-way, the therapist’s music does have certain effects on the client. If we flip the analogy around, however, it becomes even more interesting. What if the client is the performer and the therapist is the audience? This actually works quite well a lot of the time. The half diminished chord in ‘God Only Knows’ becomes the active ingredient in music therapy when it is played by the client. Since actually doing this requires a level of musical sophistication we don’t routinely encounter the analogy might seem a bit absurd. But if we extend the analogy to include any moment of musical intensity then it begins to make more sense. Furthermore, as musical performers we all understand this. Music can be therapeutic when you go to a gig or listen to a recording, but this NEVER approaches the intensity of a meaningful performance in which you are an active participant. Not all performances are as meaningful or rewarding as they could be, but those that are; it’s a reason to be alive, to be frank.

So, ‘music isn’t medicine’? It’s misleading to say that it is, but it might also be misleading to say that it isn’t. That newly qualified colleague I mentioned before who has ‘been doing music therapy for years’. Well, the next question might be – ‘who on?’ The peak experiences that we sometimes have during performances are hard to pin down, but certainly have some quality of sharedness about them, of connection to others. Unfortunately audiences, and fellow musicians, make unreliable therapists. Sometimes they’re right there for us, but sometimes they’re not. Maybe the music therapist is partly analogous to the reliably attentive audience, partly to the sensitive fellow performer. This is still a therapy about making links, and when the links aren’t there in any musical experience, we’re unlikely to shout out ‘music is therapy!’ Maybe all music is really about making links. God only knows… ;)

Music Isn’t Medicine

I saw on Twitter recently that someone in the USA had tweeted ‘music is therapy’. They were at a conference and expressing their enthusiasm about an experience they’d had there. I didn’t do anything socially unacceptable, like replying to the tweet with my pedantic objections. I just thought to myself ‘no it isn’t’. But then I thought – what’s the motivation for saying this?

Another thing that happened, related to this, again on social media: a friend and colleague recently qualified as a music therapist, with flying colours in fact. She put this up on Facebook. She’s a highly respected performer of many years’ standing, and another musician wrote ‘you’ve been doing music therapy for years’, which was obviously meant in a nice way. People who don’t know much about music therapy, when they hear the term, tend to think first of all about the potential therapeutic properties of music itself, which is quite natural. On the BAMT website there’s a good video by Kalani Das which explains why this is an error (www.bamt.org ). However, music therapists do sometimes perpetuate the idea that music is intrinsically therapeutic, and that this is part of what we have to offer. It’s a good selling point perhaps.

The problem is partly semantic. Things can be ‘therapeutic’ without being ‘therapy’, just as things can smell nice without being perfume. Furthermore, music isn’t necessarily therapeutic, any more than talking is. Shakespeare or Eastenders might be therapeutic, Newsnight might not be. With music, the effect depends on context, and on what the music is. Some music has an anti-therapeutic effect on me, there being certain musical sounds which can transform my mood markedly for the worse.

Of course, some music is therapeutic, and can make me feel a lot better than I did before listening to it. This might be where a misunderstanding arises, because most of us have had this experience. If we didn’t, we probably wouldn’t bother listening to music. When we listen to music that we like, we’ve usually chosen it. There might also be something in a piece of music that we feel connects to us on a personal level, making us feel that we have shared emotional experiences with the composer or performers. One interesting question might be, is this feeling of connection intrinsic to the music itself, or is it a side effect? Is the ‘good’ feeling something transferred to us from the performer or is it arising within us? In a music therapy context, it doesn’t really matter; because music therapy doesn’t operate within a performer to audience dynamic, and, in the immediate term, doesn’t necessarily make the client feel ‘better’.

Leaving aside the fact that the music in therapy usually involves active musical participation on both sides, in contrast to a performance, it’s not the aesthetic or emotional content of the music that has the primary therapeutic effect. It’s not about the universality of music so much as the specificity of the therapeutic context. That feeling that you get from the half-diminished chord in ‘God Only Knows’ is probably not the active ingredient in music therapy. Music is a means of connection (among others like talking, body language, turning up on time etc.) but it's not the music itself (and there is such a thing as 'music itself') which is the therapeutic agent. Music therapy is, to a great extent, about the purposeful use of music to make links. These links might be interpersonal, inter-psychic or intra-psychic. The links, whether between the therapist and the client, different group members, the client’s array of internal objects, or the client and their attachment figures, are the therapy. Here it is again: the links are the therapy. So, snappy tag-lines (and magic chords) aside, music isn’t medicine.

Hearing and Being Heard

Hard-bitten professional musicians look away now…

I was ‘feeling the love’ after playing in the John Wilson Orchestra Prom last week (still on iPlayer folks…). There’s something affirming about the experience of playing in an orchestra, of being part of that delicate balancing act of creating a performance. What is John doing in the rehearsal process that creates the excitement? It’s partly about communicating attention to detail, an awareness that ‘I’m listening to you’ that keeps everyone on their toes. I felt like every one of my notes could be heard. This apparent aural omniscience is unnerving but also helpful. It implies that he will hear the subtleties of the individual contributions and that they will be appreciated, so that it’s worth making the effort: ‘tenor sax two bars before letter D (accompanying the big trumpet solo); start the vibrato a little earlier on the second minim of the bar please’.

This links to the therapist-client relationship. It’s the ‘I’m hearing you’ aspect of the therapist’s role that is analogous to the conductor. And to the players, the conductor is the representative of the audience, as well as the bridge to it. I’m not thinking too much about the people at the back of the hall because that’s his responsibility. He’s not so much the superego as the link to the other. This is analogous to the mother-infant relationship, where the mother is the connection to the outside world. It’s important not to overstate this in a professional context I suppose, because we’re all, also, just ‘turning up for work’ and ‘getting the job done’, but there’s something that makes a good performance feel really worthwhile, that’s more than just fulfilling a role. You are part of a collective experience which mirrors something fundamental about human relationships, about the need to hear and be heard.

Why do we need to be heard? Because we need to feel first that others are there, and then that they can understand us and that we are connected to them through shared experiences. The conductor, the therapist, the parent; all have a big responsibility, which is to allow this to happen.

BAMT Conference Roundtable Report - ‘So what is music therapy then?’ – Talking about music therapy with non-music therapists

I was delighted that Ann Sloboda, Alexia Quin, Sarah Hadley, Karen Sharp and Neta Spiro had agreed to be on the panel for this roundtable discussion. This was an interesting process, as when we met for our pre-conference discussion it became clear that we could talk on the subject for a lot longer than the allotted 90 minutes. I had invited each person because of their particular experiences of having to communicate about music therapy, so we would have perspectives from the course leader, the head of a charity, the NHS service manager, the trainee and the researcher. We decided that, instead of following the usual model of having a series of short presentations followed by a discussion, we would simply introduce ourselves and then launch straight into the latter part. I had certain ideas about what each of the panellists might bring to the table, based on their professional experience and positions. What I certainly didn’t know was how much the rest of the people in the room would bring to the discussion which, as it turned out, was a lot.

We considered whether we even need a definition for music therapy, whether this is a useful concept, or whether it is more helpful to describe what music therapy might achieve in a specific context. Part of this process was stimulated by some attempts at definition which Neta presented to the room. She had a number of these at the ready, but in the event we looked at only two, so lively was the ensuing discussion. These were the BAMT definition, which was relatively succinct, and the definition of the American Music Therapy Association, which was lengthy and seemed to be attempting to cover all bases, perhaps as a response to the legalities of the medical insurance system in the USA. Both definitions had parts which people found contentious, while both had useful content as well. Parts of the American definition were very clear and definite, which was good, but there was a danger of promising too much. Is it still ‘music therapy’ if ‘therapeutic aims’ are not wholly met?

The diversity of contexts in which music therapists find themselves, along with the variety of personal experiences which they bring to the work, both have an impact on the way the work is talked about. One person, who came from a business background before becoming a music therapist, compared our task to that of marketing a product. Do we describe a bottle of Domestos as ‘blue and made of plastic’, or do we say that it ‘kills 99% of known germs’. In other words, is it more useful to talk about what music therapy might achieve than trying to pin down what it ‘is’? Another person described their work in a Steiner school, where the process of music therapy might be described as ‘soul care’, acknowledging that such a formulation is very context-specific and would probably not be useful in a mainstream school or within a ‘medical-model’ culture.

There was some discussion about the importance of the way we talk about music therapy. Do we try to present ourselves as ‘knowledgeable experts’, using fancy language to demonstrate our level of training and experience, or should we always aim for clarity and simplicity? (I think it would be fair to say that the consensus was towards the latter.) Certain statements seemed to be at the core of what most people in the room thought about music therapy, such as the idea of ‘the power of music’ and the idea that ‘music is essential to every human being’. Had we had more time it would have been interesting to explore these assumptions a bit more. I asked, ‘Is music always powerful?’, which met with some acknowledgement of the validity of the question, but we didn’t explore this in depth.

A couple of things seemed clear. One was that music therapists, or at least the ones who came to this roundtable, are pretty good at talking about their work with non-music therapists, and they think carefully about the language they use to describe it, adopting a pragmatic approach which can adapt according to the situation. Another was that an important aspect of this is confidence. People were sometimes uncomfortable with being asked to give a definition, and I put the panel members on the spot a couple of times with his one. The aim of this discussion was never to arrive at an agreed definition, but rather to explore the challenges that the idea presents, and to share approaches. This felt like an appropriate thing to be doing as part of a conference which was exploring the developing identity of the profession. It has given all of us plenty of food for thought. No doubt the discussions will continue.

Your Supervisor is Always Wrong

Don’t get me wrong, supervision is very important. I’ve been supervising for a few years and always find it a privilege to be involved in the shared process of thinking about a client. In music therapy we have this unique ingredient of listening back to audio or watching video. It doesn’t happen often enough, usually for logistical reasons, but when it does it can throw new light on the work. We can also make suggestions about what to do musically, based on our musical impressions of the client. ‘You could try matching the pulse here’, ‘perhaps the client would respond to your voice’, ‘try playing a bit less; wait to hear what the client does with the silence’. There’s an imaginative process where the supervisor tries to get a sense of the client, probably picturing them a certain way, thinking about what it might be like to be with them. There might be some elements of role play in supervision. Sometimes I might imagine what I would say to a client, and say this, in the tone of voice I might use, so that the supervisee gets an idea of what I’m driving at, of the affect as well as the intention.

As a supervisee I usually feel these moments, when the supervisor imagines what they might do with this client, making suggestions or acting out a scenario, to be off the mark. I almost always think, to some extent, ‘No you haven’t quite got it’, or even ‘Seriously? That’ll never work’. This is such a consistent thing, with every supervisor, that it’s either about me (always possible – maybe I just hate getting advice) or about the process of supervision. Winnicott has this to say: “What matters to the patient is not the accuracy of the interpretation so much as the willingness of the analyst to help, the analyst’s capacity to identify with the patient”, and perhaps this applies to supervision as well, since we are mirroring something about the therapeutic process.

I’ve had these experiences in peer supervision too. One sticks in my mind, when I was describing a client who would go running out of the therapy room, and a colleague suggested singing about this, reflecting the client’s actions in the music. This seemed so far-fetched in relation to this young man that it was almost comical. I tried to imagine his reaction if I started singing ‘You’re running out of the room’ in a light baritone, perhaps with a Schubertian accompaniment – ludicrous! But perhaps there was something useful about the process. Imagining what my client might do with a certain response put me back in the room for a moment. The incongruity of the suggestion helped to highlight something, even if it was just that this client might not be someone who would respond to sung reflection. Generally, of course, it’s not such a far-out idea. With some clients, particularly younger children, singing about what they’re doing can make a useful connection. With this person the idea threw his personality into sharp relief. There was no way he would connect with this approach, but it was useful to think about why.

When the supervisor ‘gets it wrong’, this is really an important part of their job. Perhaps as a supervisor myself I’m looking for a get-out clause, but as a supervisee I can feel the helpfulness of this idea. As well as providing a sort of reverse image of the client (is this akin to Bion’s ‘intense beam of darkness’, helping to support our negative capability?) it also reminds me that the supervisor is with me now, but in the session I’m on my own with the client. I can get support, but the clinical work is still my responsibility. Furthermore it emphasises the time differential. In supervision you are either imagining yourself back into the past or projecting yourself into the future. What could I have done? What did this mean? How could I respond next time? Anything the supervisor says, to state the obvious, they are saying now, in supervision. If you try to freeze-frame and carry this forward into the next session it probably won’t work. Bion again – ‘without memory or desire’ – including the desire to implement suggestions from supervision. Listen to your supervisor, absorb their words, experience the containment, then forget about it all, clear your head, and do the next session.

The Autumn of Goodbyes

I love the Abbey Lincoln version of ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’. She approaches the song with a Coltrane-ish modal feel, creating a lot of space for the rhythm section, and Joe Lovano’s tenor. The lyrics are really interesting. It seems to be a song about memory, regret and dreams. There is an impressionistic quality to the array of images and a free associative way of linking these together. The killer couplet comes towards the end – “When you knew that it was over in the autumn of goodbyes/For a moment you could not recall the colour of his eyes”. The portentous quality that has been building all the way through reaches a catharsis at this moment. There is a big perfect cadence in the tonic minor, which follows a long sequence using a lot of fifth relationships, where for a while there is the possibility of a major key resolution. In this moment the true meaning of the song seems to be revealed. It’s about loss, perhaps even about death, and everything we have heard up to this point is revealed as fragmented memories, swirling around and seeming to appear at random. The cycle of fifths is also a clever musical allusion to this symbolic circularity, giving the impression of unending movement, along with eternal returns.

The other day I looked up the lyrics. Can’t remember why, maybe the song was just buzzing around my head (so to speak) – it’s very catchy. To my surprise, instead of the portentous couplet there were the lines ‘When we knew that it was over you were suddenly aware/that the autumn leaves were turning to the colour of her hair’. This was worrying. I looked up a number of different versions of the lyrics, all the same stuff about leaves and hair colour, except for the Dusty Springfield version, which had my treasured lines. Then I listened to some different versions on Youtube, including the Dusty Springfield one. She sings it beautifully, a cleaner more commercial sound than Abbey Lincoln’s jazz version, but still great. Then ‘the autumn leaves were turning to the colour of his hair’. I couldn’t find the Abbey Lincoln lines in any other version. They’re not just better lines, for me they had become the whole point of the song, the denouement. And it just doesn’t work. You wouldn’t notice wistfully that autumn leaves were turning to the colour of someone’s hair (leaving aside the racial implications of the line, which may have been important for Abbey). Autumn leaves are all different colours, even the leaves on one tree. The whole idea is bullshit. Now forgetting the colour of someone’s eyes – that I can imagine. I can imagine how devastating that could be, how the feeling that we knew someone could be dreadfully undermined by this sudden realisation, contained within it the suggestion that there may be many other things about that person that we didn’t know, or which had slipped away from our failing memory of them.

I finished working with a client, an 8-year-old boy with a history of trauma and ‘difficult’ home life, in a school with many similar children. This was several years ago now. For the final session I suggested that we record something as a memento of our time together. I promised to make a CD of the improvised piece and to give it to him when I was back in school later that week. This felt like a fitting way to end our final session, being creative together, and producing something meaningful, which he might perhaps refer back to, treasure even. Later that week I went to his class room to give him the CD. I handed it to him. He stood there and fixed my gaze. He continued staring right into my eyes, unmoving, holding the CD. I was filled with a sense that this ending had been abrupt, inadequate, that the ‘good’ ending had been for my benefit whilst in reality he was feeling abandoned. My lovely creative ending was an empty gesture. This moment transformed the final session which had happened two days before, decimated my convenient narrative. Since then I have found consolation in Adam Phillips assertion, paraphrasing Valéry, that therapy ‘is never finished, only abandoned’. This is, of course the reverse of my ‘Windmills of Your Mind’, experience. I started with the lame version, and this client gave me the killer couplet, the REAL version, the one with meaning. We lose people, and no two versions are the same, but the one that stares reality in the face, unblinking, that’s the best one, in art and in life, and in music therapy, which is somewhere in the overlap between the two.

On Playing Badly

I’ve said before that I think musical competence is a really important aspect of our work as music therapists. Clients often need to feel that we can support them, that we have the musical resources to do what’s needed. This might be to do with playing in the right key for the client’s voice, being able to lay down a solid groove on a drum, or just demonstrating general musical competence to reassure them that we know what we’re doing. It’s also an important part of our identity as music therapists, that we are also musicians. This can sometimes be a source of anxiety as we also all have our musical weaknesses, uncomfortable areas we’d rather not have exposed. For me it’s singing. This is awkward as there’s really no getting away from the need to use your singing voice at times, especially working with children. And don’t give me that stuff about how ‘everyone can sing’ and ‘it’s just about confidence’ and all that. In fact working with young children in music therapy has helped my confidence in singing, but I wouldn’t buy the album of me performing the ‘Great American Songbook’. I can use my voice in sessions to some effect, when needed, and sometimes I even sing in tune. However, it’s not my thing. Saxophone is my thing, and to a lesser extent piano, but I don’t spend all my time in music therapy sessions playing these two instruments. Sometimes I use guitar, sometimes bass, sometimes drums, hand percussion, and so on. Also, clients will ask me to do other things I can’t do very well, like beatbox, or play a particular song that I don’t know, by an artist I’ve only vaguely heard of (the generation gap isn’t getting any smaller). Then what?

Sarah Brand was quoted in Musician magazine recently as saying that “I wouldn’t say you have to be a great musician [to be a music therapist] but you have to be good”. This is an interesting statement because it begs several questions, among which, ‘What is a good, or great, musician?’ After all, you don’t have to be a ‘great musician’ to be a musician, so what’s contained in this assertion, because I think it means something interesting? Perhaps she was talking about technical capability, or versatility. Perhaps what she meant was that you don’t have to be able to play to a ‘professional standard’, which might mean that while you can play well enough, the phone’s not ringing with highly paid gigs and sessions. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of musicians who have made a lot of money without being necessarily ‘great’, while there are also music therapists who undoubtedly are excellent musicians.

Being a musician, a good or great one, is such a multi-faceted thing. It’s not just about technical ability, as we all know. It’s also about tone, sensitivity, feel, timing, a sense of drama, so many things. Stan Getz reputedly said that ‘there are 4 qualities essential to a great jazz man [or woman]: taste, courage, individuality and irreverence’. Not a bad list, and nothing there about anything specifically technical. Those 4 things are also really good qualities for a music therapist to have, and perhaps to encourage in their clients.

And you don’t need to be able to ‘play well’ to be courageous, or irreverent, or to play with taste even. So Stan’s onto something interesting here that’s relevant to music therapists. When I play with other musicians, the things that can really annoy me, really grate, are not to do with musical ability, in a narrow sense. It’s when people don’t listen to what’s going on around them. It’s the piano player who fills all the gaps in the melody, the drummer who plays too loud and too much, the saxophone player who goes on for too long. It’s human, rather than musical, qualities which I really value, people who can play for the band, rather than just for themselves, players who you feel are really inside the here-and-now, rather than imagining themselves sounding like their favourite recordings, but not paying attention to the immediate musical events. ‘Hell is full of musical amateurs’ perhaps (said George Bernard Shaw), but it’s also full of lazy, bored professionals, just getting through the gig. If you can make a connection with another person by playing something simple which they get, which they can connect with right now, then you’re doing your job as a music therapist, and as a musician.

In music therapy, playing ‘well’ isn’t the only thing, it’s just one choice. In might even be an artistic choice. Martin Scorsese admires the Beatles film ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ partly for its amateurishness, which for him is refreshing in contrast to the slick professionalism of most Hollywood movies. When a client strums the open strings on a guitar, an appropriate and encouraging response might be for me to support on piano, creating a containing structure for their explorations, but it might be better on some occasions for me to play bass or drum kit at the basic level I have on these instruments. This forces me to play simply, and it puts me in touch with something about the client’s experience. We can ‘play badly’ together, which can sometimes be more liberating than playing ‘well’.

Accentuate the Negative

I went to see the movie Bridge of Spies recently. It’s really good by the way – see it if you haven’t already. One of the things I liked about it was the way it approached the problem of negative projections. A lawyer in the late fifties, played by Tom Hanks, is required to defend a Soviet spy, played by Mark Rylance. This is the height of the Cold War of course, so the spy is a hated figure in the USA, and by association the lawyer is too, for a while. In order to do his job with integrity, he has to be prepared to withstand this irrational hatred. He refuses to collude with it, and treats the spy as a fellow human being. This is the core of the drama, and is part of what makes the film really interesting and unusual. There are echoes of 12 Angry Men, The Shawshank Redemption or Erin Brockovich in this – one person’s resilience in the face of others’ hostility. One person who is able to think rather than act out. Some people have a talent for this. Others don’t. Jeremy Corbyn seems pretty good at it. ‘Dave’ Cameron – not so much, always seeking approval… JC seems a bit tetchy at times, but he does seem to be able to stick to his principles, to stay focused. I like the way he continues to ask questions from the public, despite the sneers of the Tory backbenchers.

I’ve written before about the role of the therapist, particularly in school, as an outsider, about how there can be something useful about this. Not for the first time, I’ve lost a couple of school contracts in the last few months. On both occasions this seemed to be linked to a key member of staff leaving (the head or deputy head) and being replaced by someone who wanted to make some changes (i.e. cuts). This is always difficult, because as the drama plays out, you have to stay focused on the sessions. The clients shouldn’t suffer because of my feelings of disappointment, resentment, hatred etc. Actually this is ok, because in my experience music therapy sessions are so much more intense than ‘normal life’ (whatever that is) that staying focused on the work while it is happening is perfectly manageable. What’s trickier is maintaining the professional relationships during this time of adversity, not acting out, but keeping an overview, seeing myself as one part of the system rather than the centre of the universe. If other people are able to develop fictions, for example that music therapy sessions are ‘just a bit of fun’ and so dispensable, then I am equally capable of inflating my own importance in my own mind. Understanding why people attach certain assumptions and fantasies to you, and why they project onto you, is essentially about adopting this broader perspective.

This was all brought into sharp focus by the BBC’s recent documentary about Camila Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company. I worked for the charity in 2008-9 and was aware at the time of certain flaws in the way it was being run. Camila was clearly being idealised by a lot of her staff and service users, and even more so by the media. Her big personality and flamboyant dress sense had certain advantages, enabling her to get the media exposure she needed in order to raise money from various high profile sources; the government, big time celebrities and so on. She also had a lot of very able people volunteering for the charity, giving their time for the cause, and it was a noble cause. There was a lot of great work being done and Kids Company had a strong therapeutic ethos. I was out on the edges of the schools’ programme, a newly qualified therapist grateful for the work and getting some valuable experience and support. But it appeared that Camila bought into the idealisation, both from the media and from the vulnerable people Kids Company was working with. The charity has been criticised for creating ‘dependence’, but this is inevitable when you are providing for the most needy in society. In a sense, they’re already dependent. What didn’t work out, and seemed to be part of her undoing, was the assumption of invulnerability, and that the idealisation could be sustained. Negative or positive, you need to take people’s projections with a pinch of salt, because they can quickly reverse their polarity. Jeremy Corbyn is being very careful to steer the narrative away from himself and to focus on more important topics. James Donovan (the lawyer portrayed in Bridge of Spies) takes the brick through his window philosophically.

A client told me ‘I like you’, then said ‘I want to have music therapy every day’. He’s struggling in school and is seen as a problem. This made me feel great. What a fantastic therapist I must be – the only person who really understands this child and gives him the space he needs to be creative and expressive. On the other hand, he only sees me once a week. If I accept the projection then I’m in danger of giving him the message: me=good, everyone else=bad, which is hardly helpful. Ultimately he needs to understand that the good things he sees in me are really coming from him. I’m just giving him the space to discover aspects of himself. I also need to try and share this with others, and to encourage them to see him in this way, that he can help them find the solution to the problems that they perceive in him, if only they give him the space to do this. Winnicott ends his chapter on adolescence, in Playing and Reality, with an address to the parents, saying “you won’t be thanked”. The satisfaction of a job well done won’t necessarily come from others, neither for parents, nor for therapists. We can’t wait for that pat on the back. But if we’re sceptical about idealisation, then we can also live with the negative projections and see them for what they really are, and understand the process.