Monday 29 February 2016

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’.

Wednesday 10 February 2016

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.