Re: Response to "Music Therapy in the Ukraine"
About Ivannikova, Mariya
Biography
MA, Dipl.-Psych., made her guest study at the Department for Music Therapy at University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal, Germany, from April 1999 to July 2000. From 2000 to 2003 took part at carrying out of a new collaborative project between State University Zaporizhzhia and University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal "Social psychological rehabilitation with music," Music Therapy. From 2002 to 2004 worked as a Lecturer for Psychology and Languages at the Department of Social Pedagogy and Psychology at State University Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. She currently studies in Norway to complete her music therapy education.
A Perspective of Using Self-Made Instruments in Sessions of Music Therapy[1]
Abstract
The paper presents the process by which the idea of making instruments for music therapy sessions was developed. It gives some examples of building simple instruments and using them offering music therapy for depressive patients. Advantages and disadvantages of using such instruments are briefly presented.
Introduction
During the past few months I began to learn about more and more people striving and wondering in music therapy. Every time it was a unique feeling I got: a feeling of common interests and common questions, a feeling of belonging to the common world.
Reading the contribution by Paula Dowdy, a music therapy student from United States, and seeing our common points I have got an even stronger wish to share some more ideas about covering lack of musical instruments for therapeutic sessions I came up with whilst being an Ukrainian student and embarking on my first clinical project in music therapy.
Buying instruments myself was not a feasible option: not only due to the high cost involved, but also an apparent lack of choice in the one music shop I knew of in Zaporizhzhia. Available in this shop were guitars, tambourines, big cymbals, squeezeboxes and so on. But I had my doubts, even if I had the means to purchase them that they would be suitable for patients suffering from depression. So my mission in finding musical instruments, for my clinical project, changed its emphasis. I had to make a free improvisation to the theme "making music instruments" as soon and as inexpensive as only possible...
I began to examine every available object in my room, the kitchen, and the balcony with old and sometimes completely non useful things. The bathroom and the store-room followed. My family observed me, running from one corner to the other. Although they kept silent I could read the question constructing itself on their faces about what I was doing... Every time I had something new in my hands; I was trying many different ways, to achieve different sounds from each object. Moving from one to another until I found something which could possibly work...
Making Instruments
In the bathroom I found a soap-dish, in the kitchen I discovered a wooden set, which we used as children when cooking with our mother: an instrument used for grinding potatoes, a small hammer for beating meat, a rolling pin. So I could use two of the wooden pieces as claves and combine the third one with the soup-dish as guiro. I thought it was a good start, and so continued with my search.
Photo 1: Wooden kitchen utensils.
Unexpectedly in the cupboard on the balcony I found empty bottles, which used to hold soluble vitamin tablets. I also found many other plastic bottles such as shampoo bottles, other dietary supplement containers. Under the desk I noticed an old tin can of beer, which my brother kept his old soviet coins in... So I put some of coins into two tight and long bottles of vitamins. The sound they produced was like tambourines. Also they were small, simple and easy to use.
Photo 2: Vitamin bottles with coins.
In observing my efforts, my mother suggested to put different types of groats into the other bottles. So I had two bottles with peas, which produced rather loud sounds; two with rice, producing softer sounds. The last two bottles I filled with kidney beans. It became a "heavy groats instrument". The bottles with millet in them produced the softest sounds. Thanks to such a variety of products I produced different kinds of maracas.
Photo 3: Bottles with groats.
I thought it would be great to have an equivalent instrument to the triangle. And no sooner than I had this thought I saw a cake trowel. This combined with a teaspoon, I thought, could possibly have the same effect as a triangle! So I bound some nylon thread from the trowel to the spoon. So the string suspended the trowel and the latter had to be long enough so the tea spoon could be used to tap the improvised trowel "triangle". If one held the trowel without using the string the hand reduced the vibration and therefore the sound could become toneless.
Photo 4: Trowel and tea spoon.
My next idea was connected find an equivalent set of chimes. It could be only a hand chime, because I could not see that I'd have the ability of producing a holder to create bar chimes. Such a holder seemed not to be a musical instrument and my imagination could not work in this direction. So I noticed that cartridge-cases of patrons that my brother had on his bookshelf as an addition to composition he had made once. They were of different size and produced different sounds. I just needed something to put them together. A wooden school-lineal seemed to be not enough to hold the weight of them. So I required a much more sturdy peice. I thought, maybe a thick stick would do, but had no luck in finding one the right size. I found a flat wooden plank, but feared that it was too small. But I preserved and began winding every cartridge with nylon threat. Afterwards I bound them to the wooden stick. I had to make sure that cartridge-cases had no contact to the stick in order to make the sound clear and lasting.
Next I remembered a German seminar in improvisation. We used small one-way plastic glasses for one of our musical activities. At this point I began to contemplate, whether different kinds of such glasses could produce different sounds. So I took the larger ones, which were made of thick plastic, supposed to be used for beer; and smaller ones, which were just universal for all other kinds of beverages. Small plastic glasses were different color and also of different thickness. So not only did I get different resonance-surface, but also different resonance-quality.
Photo 5: One-way plastic glasses.
Another find I had was some pebbles, collect by myself. I found them one summer on the beach of The Black Sea. These pebbles had different natural ornament qualities and had been made smooth by the sea. They attracted my attention because they were unusual. So I picked small and bigger ones and carried them home. Seeing the pebbles again I thought that it would be possible to use them as simplest percussion instruments.
Photo 6: Pebbles.
Last but not least I discovered an old hand bell, which was hand made by someone else a long time ago. It was not aesthetically pleasing. It had a rubber handle and a rusty metal surface. But the sound was near fantastic for the situation! And that was the most important thing.
Photo 7: Cartridge-cases of patrons.
So the arsenal of instruments was ready. With sinking heart I waited for the first music therapeutic meeting with my group of patients.
Photo 8: All objects together.
Using Instruments in Sessions
I had reservations connected with using the instruments I'd created. Pure music activities with them, I thought at first, could be clumsy to carry out. But I remembered doing a practice with other students in a heriatric department of Pfeiffersche Stiftungen in Magdeburg. We worked as co-therapists and sometimes used marsh-music or polkas, which had a clear rhythm to play an accompaniment to with a group of patients. The difference here was not only that our patients in Magdeburg (heriatric) and my patients in Zaporizhzhia (depressive) were rather different, but I also did not have any co-therapists. So I was not absolutely sure whether it would work also in other conditions.
To find such kind of music in Zaporizhzhia was almost absolutely impossible task too! I visited all the music shops, but classical music was not easy to obtain: there were some CDs, but were only the popular pieces, which everybody knows, and which I could hardly use for my purpose. Maybe the patients could have fixed emotional memories to this music. Other point was the rhythm of them, which was not suited for my purpose in active forms of music therapy.
My next idea was to find something with rhythmic potential, to use the instruments to. And it turned to be tongue twisters, sayings and short poems. Russian was language I used for that: some of the group members could not understand Ukrainian, because we were in the eastern part of the country.
So, for example, I could offer some tongue twisters like following:
It was also possible to use poems like that in the sessions:
At some points it was not so easy to find such poems which were both short and had a rather neutral tonality. I had my doubts whether children poems would be suitable, because the first remark I heard from one member of the group when seeing instruments that he felt be taken for a child. So I wanted to avoid such impression trying to find poems for adults to offer, with no age determination. Therefore I had much less material to take under consideration.
In poems for adults there were generally emotions and feeling which played a key role. To have such feeling when working with depressive patients was, as I thought, rather dangerous. So I strived to focus on objects and not feelings first. But there were not so many "object-poems" available among poetry for adults. It could be that my family and I have special favorite authors who devoted their poems to the human feelings and emotions. But at some points I felt that it had to do not only with our preferences, that that could really be one of the features of Russian adults' poetry.
To find a way to go I had to take long poems which could be suitable and to choose one passage or two for offering them as short ones. So I worked with a poem written by our classic Alexander Pushkin:
If it was that someone did not feel ready to use these created music instruments, she or he could be included in the group process by reading the available twisters, sayings or poems. The group chose which instrument to take to accompany, and everybody was welcome to make suggestions about the ways of accompaniment, and therefore could chose an instrument suitable for that purpose.
Before going into a musical improvisation I offered one of combinations described above. During first active sessions some of my patients expressed verbally and nonverbally that they did not feel comfortable with instruments; they changed them after every musical activity we had. But at the end of the project the members of the group found their favorite "instruments" and kept using them.
As for the one-way plastic glasses, they could be used for finding a difference of sounds which could be produced by them (differentiating). So the members of the group began to compare the sound of different qualities of plastic, of different sizes of glasses, founded out how they sounded when falling on the floor, on the table and so on. Afterwards a "plastic-glasses-symphony" followed, whereby the patients used their glasses as they wanted in the common improvisation.
Advantages and disadvantages of self made instruments
It was clear for me that using of self-made instruments had both weaknesses and strengths. So "chimes" turned not to be a very solid, and after the first active session cartridge-cases separated from the stick and they became two separate instruments. Now they could be held in the right and left hand and used as simple metal claves. But even so this "instrument" turned out to be a favorite instrument for one of the group members.
The maracas and tambourines were opened up to see what was inside of them. First it focused the attention away from the group activity. But afterwards we could use it for describing the instruments. So it was possible to involve all the impressions into the therapeutic process. Thereby the most important point was that the patients were distracted from their negative experiences and emotions, and turned their attention to other things.
The point to consider was that I could not see beforehand which verses or proverbs would be suitable for wich members or whether all the instruments I had created would be accepted by the group. But I could offer a possible variety to choose. And that was a method, which I liked best. Thereby I felt more free and not seen as a person who knew everything and could prophesize what would happen after an hour or a week, or what the patients would do or feel. Such things could not be foreseen, as I have already learned myself.
So during one of musical activities with elements of improvisation one patient unexpectedly began to use her voice playing an "instrument". The lady sang a folk song "Во поле берёза стояла" ("In the field there was a birch"):
And frankly speaking I could not even imagine that it could work this way. Making as we call it my "observing practice" in one of clinics in Germany where sessions of music therapy were offered for depressive patients, I had never noticed that some of the members of the group began to sing during an improvisation using "real" instruments... I suppose it had to do not only with these improvised instruments, but I would to underline that it was possible even when using them.
This case showed me a possibility to use also songs in sessions offering them to the members of the group. And at this point I also had to pay much attention to the content of the songs I could offer to choose: the most known ones were also about feelings and had some certain sadness already in the texts not speaking about the melody...
Speaking about one more advantage I would like to say that using improvised instruments provided the group members with good possibility to criticize the quality of instruments, which were "not suitable" for making a perfect sound. During the first activities I got such feedbacks. But later the patients did not say anything like that any more. They described the music they made together, noticed who was louder and who was less so. They noticed whose "instruments" made a "carpet of sounds" more bright and gave positive feedback to each other.
The "instruments" seemed to help the patients to realize that it was not about perfect musical play that it was about other things, which were even more important than perfect music or absolute musicality.
It was challenging to use self made instruments, but I felt that it was a generally successful experience. On the one hand I wished to have real instruments to give better possibility to my group for expressing themselves, but on the other hand I realized that I did the best to my ability at the time and with the circumstances.
Summary
There could be found many different strategies to built instruments to use in sessions of music therapy. One possibility which could preserve your time and even more is by looking around you. You may find many usual things which could, with a little imagination, be used in various unusual ways to make music. So a wooden kitchen set and a soup-dish could be turned into claves and guiro; old bottles become tambourines and maracas; spoons and cartridge-cases turned to be triangles and chimes; and pebbles to be used as the simplest percussion instruments.
Self-made instruments can be applied for making brighter musical pieces, for accompanying of proverbs and sayings. Having both week and strong features they could help you to offer active forms of music therapy working in rather uneasy circumstances.
I think it could be even nicer to take slightly different materials and make instruments more attractive. But it is not only this way that we can achieve musical instruments for our aims. We can also use already created objects for making music. Some time ago I noticed a little wooden mortar on one of the shelves in a supermarket. Every time I went there, I looked at this object; at first I could not understand what attracted my attention. Some days ago I just bought, it without any idea how to use it. It was only later whilst unpacking it from the packaging. I automatically tried to produce sound from it and recognized it as a "stirring drum".
Photo 9: Wooden mortar.
Psychology is rather a new thing for Ukrainian society and in most cases ordinary people do not know exactly what it is. It can be perceived as a miracle. To visit a psychologist is not seen as a normal thing to do. A visit to a psychotherapist seems to be even worse. There is also a feeling that psychologists and psychotherapists can see everything about complete characteristic of a person in maybe just first few minutes.
Using self made instruments for active forms of music therapy I could clearly see one more time that it could not be foreseen exactly what a concrete person would prefer: what instrument to play, what musical activity to follow, how she or he would behave during sessions. I could see that every member of the group had an own understanding of making music.
The world around us is really full of different sounds and we can find new ways to produce them.... So I hope that some of thoughts, which occurred to me, could give other interested people helpful ideas. And maybe develop more advanced ones to use in practicing music therapy, in countries where getting real music instruments is not always easy or affordable.
Notes
[1]I would like to thank warmly Mia Marie Wraight, who helped me a lot by offering different English expressions and therefore making my text easier to read and understand.
References
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