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On Juggling of Different Hats

by Leslie Bunt | Sun, 04/18/2010 - 23:00

Juggling is a beautiful action, a rounded and balanced flow of movement. I certainly do not have the skills to juggle but my life as a musician and music therapist seems to have many parallels with such an action. Whilst engaged in a range of work how can I keep the movement of different ‘hats’ in play? How can there be a sense of flow and balance when trying to juggle the various hats? How can such differing demands and challenges find their rightful place alongside family and personal life?[1]

Three springboards triggered this image of juggling. The first was reading a report: Creating a Land with Music - the work, education, and training of professional musicians in the 21st Century (Youth Music, 2002). A contemporary musician often builds up a portfolio of different work, the writers of the report proposing a kind of "genetic code for the musician comprising the four central roles of composer, performer, leader, and teacher, with linked roles relating to one or more of them." (p. 5) Developments in music therapy were cited as an example of redefining and extending the artistic areas of the musician’s work, creating overlaps between different academic and professional disciplines (p. 17).

The second springboard was a supervision session with an insightful drama therapist which enabled me to see more clearly the connections between what I had construed originally to be the juggling of different and rather separate hats. I was invited to place various objects on a sand tray to represent symbolically the range of my different activities and roles/hats. The various objects relating to work included: a glove puppet with different coloured fingers and shapes representing individual members of different music therapy groups; some birds representing what were then the different branches of MusicSpace[2], - they had their feet firmly on the ground but were also free to fly off independently in different directions which in reality has happened recently- ; and a toy train representing travelling to teach in different places. All a bit obvious it must be said. But I did surprise myself with the choice of a centaur to represent my role in connecting to all the objects spread across the sand tray, a choice explored in a previous Voices column (Bunt, 2004). What became so clear during this supervision, and again as mentioned in the earlier column, was that everything connected to and from the music - all routes flowed to and from that source. Music, symbolically represented by a large pink quartz crystal was the centre of everything on that sand tray, to which all things were connected with a great feeling of flow and movement.

This led to the third springboard and to trust the music as a way of furthering my understanding. This came from part of a demonstration session when in the role of "traveller" during a Guided Imagery in Music (GIM) training course. Thanks to being in a relaxed state, a very music-centred focus for the short journey and to some sensitive guiding, the flow of the opening cello melody at the start of the third movement of Brahms’ third symphony helped to unite all these apparent disparate activities/hats into one glorious present.

Of course musicians have always needed to be flexible in developing and integrating different roles; I recall one of my music therapy teacher’s maxims of "adapt or perish."[3] We can think of the troubadour/minstrel/folk tradition and the Baroque/ Classical musician needing to be composer, arranger, performer, impresario and teacher alike. Do we inherit some of these traditions? In many ways the contemporary music therapist is very much a musician of our time with many therapists engaged in aspects of the four central roles itemised in the report cited earlier. Compositional opportunities exist within our music therapy practices, the very act of improvising with individuals and groups having elements of spontaneous composition in action; the music therapist needs to maintain a level of performance skills and there are leadership and teaching opportunities within the profession.

But we must not underestimate the potential risk factors of this challenge. Having trained as a music therapist there then are additional pressures of gaining and then sustaining employment or setting-up work in different contexts, particularly within the current difficult financial climates. This might result in a very peripatetic working pattern, necessitating the personal, business and organisational skills to make connections with different teams, and then often being the only music therapist in that particular context. Care is needed to prevent that such a working pattern does not become counter-productive, isolating or over-exhausting. Music therapists are also expected to keep their reflective practices alive and up-to-date through regular supervision and on-going study.

Identity seems a further central theme here not only in relation to who we are as people but to our whole motivation in becoming musicians and music therapists. In Musical Identities the editors pose a question in relation to the nature of the self, namely: "do we construct ‘core’ self-concepts which are relatively unchanging across different situations and interactions, or do we adopt different selves in different contexts?" (Macdonald, Hargreaves & Miell, 2002, p. 13) I would like to think that my training both as a musician and music therapist overlaps to form a central core self- concept when at work but that certain aspects are brought more into the foreground depending on the context and the needs and expectations of the people to whom I relate. So how can I keep some sense of authenticity and flow whilst juggling different hats and maintaining aspects of this core self-concept in such diverse but in many ways subtly linked situations? Am I still bringing aspects of my central identity as a music therapist in these examples from my work over the last few weeks? These have included:

  • facilitating a one-off group community-based music therapy session for people living with cancer, with improvisation as the key activity;
  • providing individual sessions of Guided Imagery and Music
  • teaching groups of music therapy trainees;
  • listening to and supervising a colleague’s work;
  • attending a meeting to plan a bid for some collaborative research;
  • conducting a local choir both in rehearsal and performance.

Developing a climate of honesty and trust permeates all of these activities, without which no teaching class or therapy session, no rehearsal of performance can truly work. A sense of focused and attentive listening to individual or group needs is also a common feature of this list, alongside many facets of the processes of facilitation, witnessing, enabling, encouraging and empowering others. When appropriate, healthy qualities of leadership need to be present, including a sense of mutual respect.

Notions of "bringing together" and "connecting" lie at the source of the Latin conduco/ere. The music therapy group facilitator/conductor and the choir conductor facilitate a "bringing together" and "connecting" to the music. With the therapy group this involves the merging of the personal and the musical in group improvisation and, with the choir bringing the unheard sounds of a musical text into the heard world of musical performance (again an interesting Latin root - per-formare: to bring into form). The group members play their instruments: the choir members sing their parts.

Brynyulf Stige has pointed out that when listening to students or colleagues presenting their work in supervision we are still exercising our skills as music therapists (Stige, 2002). We may not be in direct contact with the actual music therapy but, as he points out, have an indirect relationship to it, and therefore by implication to the music at the source and meeting points of those relationships. Stige refers to a collaborative and consultative relationship that integrates the sounds and interactions of the music therapy situation within a different context. Here again there is a notion of conducting and facilitating, of listening to and leading towards the musical source.

And listening with the attentive focus of a musician/music therapist can also facilitate all voices to be heard in a meeting even when discussing a bid for research funding. How can the voices of various collaborators in the project be given sufficient space to be heard? We can think musically about the different positions and lines of debate, how they interact and develop. Where are the voices of the patients/clients and are they being given enough space? Do the proposed methodology and methods resonate with the kind of questions being asked? Is the project sufficiently well-balanced?

Finally at the source of all of these activities I would like to think that we always come back to the music, providing a sense of space and framed by silence. As Edward Said mentioned in conversation with Daniel Barenboim:

One of the striking things about the kind of work you do is that you act as an interpreter, as a performer - an artist concerned not so much with the articulation of the self, but rather with the articulation of other selves. That’s a challenge. (Barenboim & Said, 2003, p. 11)

How does this challenging comment relating to one of the world’s most gifted interpreters, performers and advocates of music resonate with the contemporary life of a music therapist?

Notes


[1] Some material for this column were first presented in unpublished form at a) the European Music Therapy Conference held in Finland in June 2004 in the paper: Integrating demands and challenges within the life of a music therapist and b) a presentation Music: a Resource for Health and Wellbeing delivered to the Music, Health and Happiness Conference, Royal Northern School of Music, November 7 2008.


[2] The MusicSpace Trust, a registered charity, was established in 1991 to create a network of community-based centres for music therapy, training, research and performance. MusicSpace is currently based in Bristol, UK.


[3] Attributed to Maggie Pickett during teaching sessions at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, music therapy course 1976/7.

References

Barenboim, Daniel and Said, Edward, W. (2003). Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. London: Bloomsbury.

Bunt, Leslie (2004). Telling our Stories. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. Retrieved April 5, 2010, from http://www.voices.no/columnist/colbunt190704.html

Macdonald, Raymond; Hargreaves, David and Miell, Dorothy, (2002). Musical Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stige, Brynyulf (2002). Culture-Centred Music Therapy. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers.

Youth Music (2002) Creating a Land with Music - the work, education, and training of professional musicians in the 21st Century. [Report commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England]. London: Youth Music. Retrieved April 5, 2010, from: http://www.youthmusic.org.uk/news/AR/ar2.html

How to cite this page

Bunt, Leslie (2010). On Juggling of Different Hats. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 12, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=colbunt190410