The other day my wife and I got into a ‘heated debate’ with my father-in-law. On the surface, this was the old left vs. right, caring vs. capitalist, young (well - …ish) and idealist vs. older and more cynical dynamic, although I’m sure he’d want to frame this differently. There was something quite exhilarating about this, even if the location of the debate, the pub, meant that the robustness of the argument became more questionable as the evening wore on. It boiled down to this: his argument – people who have greater ‘scope and scale’ in their role at work, where, if they screw up, more money and jobs are at stake, should rightly be paid more; our argument – there is a danger that ‘paid more’ ends up equating to ‘deserves higher status and respect’, and by extension, leads to assumptions about other things, like ability and intelligence. I gave the entirely self-serving example that being an effective music therapist requires just as much skill and intelligence as being the CEO of a company, but that this doesn’t stop some CEOs, or other people high up the corporate ladder, adopting, shall we say, an air of authority that can extend beyond the workplace.
I was reminded of another family event, when our generation of my wife’s extended family used to gather for dinner at Christmas time. These events were a lot of fun, despite the black-tie formality. But I recall at least one occasion when it was announced that a (male) member of the family had been ‘made a partner’ in their bank, or some such, and we all applauded. I had my own reservations about this implied slight to all those other people in the room (mostly women) who were doing equally demanding jobs, but pulling in less cash, and presumably, deemed to be lower down on the ‘scope and scale’ chart, hence, no applause for them (or me…). Nothing against those prestigious ‘partners’ per se, you understand ;)
I used to work on a project with a domestic violence charity. When we started this in 2009 there was a woman who I’ll call Catherine, who was the main point of contact in the charity for the project. She had a job title of ‘Children’s Support Worker’. She’d developed relationships with families over a long period of time, which meant that she was trusted by people in times of the most extreme stress of their lives, when they feared for their own safety and that of their children. She knew them well and was able to provide me, and the other music therapist on the project, with all of the most crucial information about the child and family, as well as helping them through the process of the child’s referral to music therapy and providing all of the emotional and practical support which that entailed. I hope she was getting paid ok, but I’m willing to bet that whatever it was, it was nowhere near her real value, not only as a human being, but also as a skilled practitioner of her craft. Frontline work is the basis on which all other work happens. Without her, and others like her, we’d all be nowhere. Needless to say, I didn’t think of this example in the pub the other day.
I recently made an application for some biggish funding for a clinical project in which music therapy would have teamed up with other health teams, charity workers, and social care. It was a long shot, and we didn’t get it. We’re a tiny profession, and we’re on the front line, which isn’t the place big funding bids normally achieve success from. My rationale was a ‘bottom-up’ approach. Therapeutic work, involving as it does the connection between the internal worlds of the client and therapist, could be seen as the bedrock of the client’s psychological wellbeing, as far as health interventions go. It’s the psychological and emotional front line. And improvised music takes place on the interface between the affectual worlds of the people using it to communicate. Music, and other non-verbal communicative channels, are at the coalface of human connection. And human connection is everything. Without it, there’s no thought, there’s no language, there’s, in a sense, no world-out-there. So it all depends how you look at it. We’re either at the lower end of the health hierarchy, a small profession, looking up at those consultant paediatricians, psychiatrists, heads of services and so on, or we’re constantly involved in a collaborative process of recreating the universe. I prefer the second one – it’s got more ‘scope and scale’.
No comments:
Post a Comment