As a music therapy student, I'm struggling to discern how much performance can occur in the context of music therapy. As of this moment, I'm open to using any aspect of music in the context of music therapy assuming a therapeutic goal is the impetus for such musical expression. In fact, I believe this formulation bears relevance to Gary Ansdell's article on performance in community based music therapy (release Novemer 1, 2005).
From my limited experiences with low functioning adults at a community center in Arlington, Massachusetts (including individuals with mental retardation, autism, down syndrome, etc.), I have seen transpersonal and pro-social benefits of music performance in action. A holiday party and fund raiser occurred recently at my site which provided clients the opportunity to express themselves artistically before an audience. Through my clinical experiences with this population I attempt to promote social interaction in the forms of music and dance. The underlying goal behind much of this work is promoting pro-social behavior, learning skills necessary for interpersonal communication, building community, developing a musical self (for music seems to circumvent the linguistic and conceptual barriers my clients possess that are also involved in becoming a person), and most significantly life enhancement. The last goal emerged through the recognition that many of my clients' lives outside the community center lack any meaningful relationships. Many dread the weekend, for they will spend the next two days in residential settings without people who hold significant meaning in their lives.
However, this article is not intended to address deficits in interpersonal interactions as they occur in residential settings. Instead, I would like to draw attention to the manner in which my clients interacted at this social event. Many clients seemed to exhibit exaggerated forms of behavior that usually occurred in the context of a music therapy setting. One individual, a thirty something man with down syndrome, proceeded to sing and dance in front of all individuals present—wandering the room in the process seemingly to more thoroughly show himself to everyone present. This is but one example of many. Overall, individuals danced and sang with more fervor than normal, and seemingly invested more aspects of self in their performance. Moreover, their sense of enjoyment in the performance matched or surpassed levels they typically exhibited in music therapy sessions. I believe the vigor with which they approached the evening is related to the lack of opportunity for expression as a result of their institutional lives.
Furthermore, my clients seemed to interpret the presence of others as a call to perform—even though the event lack rows of chairs, a stage, curtains, and other cultural elements that usually frame events as performance. Indeed, like the performances by Musical Minds—where audience participation was encouraged and the seating arrangement remained more open and informal—my clients had a tendency to interact with audience members in such a way that they involved others in their performance. I believe that expression is a fundamental human need, and furthermore, since my clients largely initiated the performance, they were acting upon an inner dictate to express in order to better know themselves and simultaneously share that self with others. In fact, on many occasions, they succeeded in coaxing a reluctant individual to dancing alongside them—to more intimately know their being. Here, as in Ansdell's article, the performance seems more process than product.
With my clients' performance in mind, I'm disinclined to view music performance as product rather than process. Since time and sound are equally connected to music, all music inherently unfolds rather than simply existing as a static entity—a description which in part describes product. Even in performances where scores are written out so that musicians may play a piece with high replicability, differences occur performance to performance; subtle timbre changes, acoustic resonances, indeed, even the fervor with which one performs a premeditated piece—how much "self" or "being" is expressed—occurs to varying degrees. Even when recording are made, and individual will undoubtedly experience the performance in a different manner each time they revisit it—hermeneutically speaking.
The notion of personalism also helped me understand my clients' performance. By singing popular songs, my clients identified with a particular cultural message; one readily shared by others. However, the clients' very being also emerged in their performance-they personalized the song to their internal meaning. I believe that my clients used the familiarity of songs as a template through which to convey the self. Because the audience members largely new the songs they performed, they were familiar of the cultural messages contained within the musical structure. However, when someone other than the original artist performs a song, they augment the song's meaning with their very being.
In closing I agree with the notion of expression as a predecessor to being. As social beings, we learn about ourselves through our interactions with others. Moreover, as witnesses to performance, we experience social learning. Performances of the reflexive kind should illuminate our being through the arts and convey social messages to others. Furthermore, I believe the reflexive component may be a significant aspect for distinguishing between professional performances and performance in community based music therapy. Finally, I believe performance oriented community music therapy has great potential for addressing systemically based mental health issues in its potential to draw individuals part of the systemic problem into musically based cultural messages concerning injustice.
I am a third year music-therapy student at the University of Louisville, currently spending a semester abroad at the Karol SzymanowskiAcademy of Music in Katowice, Poland. During my time studying music therapy in Katowice, I have been exposed to active CMT and the performance aspect of this music therapy. I am very interested in seeing and understanding the merge between performance and music therapy and how one can benefit the other in certain therapeutic situations, which is why I was drawn to this article.
I found this article interesting, relative to my current experiences with music therapy, and productive, in that it raised some excellent questions about the future of music therapy involving performance. I tend to believe supportive articles about music therapy, which could be considered emerging or "outside of the box," should to be the direction that music therapy needs to go. Our field needs to be flexible to the various needs of groups and individuals (the need to perform, or more accurately, the need for the benefits of performance) rather than strictly utilizing music therapy practices which are confined by a definition.
My recent encounter with CMT involved a short sit-in on music therapy led by my music therapy professor at a facility named Bugocice for children of a variety of ages, that provides housing and/or care for children with difficult or abusive family backgrounds or behavioral issues. Performance was a working goal with some of these children (mostly teenagers and young adults, up to the age of 20) that involved connecting the community with the performance of songs chosen by the members themselves.
I appreciated what this article had to say about the paradoxes between performance and current common music therapy practices, but found myself supporting the concept that performance is a beneficial part of music therapy (the CMT perspective, rather the the perspective of the music therapy consensus model). This was not only because of the evidence and scenarios that are offered up in the article, but also because I have observed first hand how the performance was not only beneficial to those performing (stepping out of their comfort zones, building confidence, singing songs with lyrics that they related to, etc.) but also important for the community that the performers were connecting to. The community was able to accept music that revealed a softer side of members of society that may be feared by the community due to the label and stigma put on them by the label “behavioral issues,” assigned by the school systems.
Something that particularly struck me in this article was that CMT might "negotiate" between performance as “pressure” and as “epiphany”. Yes, it is true that in some scenarios, the pressure would be greater to the client and more detrimental than the epiphany of being someone who is an individual is not. Everything has it's time and place, a performance certainly should be considered a part of the therapeutic realm in music therapy because music itself is flexible- why attempt to constrain therapeutic practices due to the fact that performance is not in the current common music therapy practices? Disregarding the external factors of the performance (who wrote the piece, how was it intended to be performed, etc.) the symbiotic relationship between the performer and the audience strikes me as rather similar to performing solos in a group situation, however performance is on a larger scale with strangers. It is dependent on what the client would best benefit from, and performance is not something that the music community should be "wary" of. In fact, we are not only connected to the medical/interpersonal/psychological side of music therapy, but also with the MUSIC, and connecting this is another way to harness support FROM the community- to show something familiar that every individual can be given the opportunity to connect with the performer about.
A definition should encompass all that something is, not confine it to what it should be. It has struck me as odd that there is even a question as to whether or not this should be a practiced approach to Community Music Therapy, seeing that it is both appropriate or beneficial in a variety of situations.
At the facility that I was observing music therapy at, there were rehearsals several Wednesday nights in preparation for a performance at the Academy of Music. The performance consisted of soloists, duets, and group arrangements (by the music therapy students at the Academy) of songs that the members had chosen. The lyrics of these songs were surprisingly revealing; rather than songs that could be considered offensive or crude, the members chose songs about experiencing hardships and moving on, of friendship, of deeper emotions. A quote that came to mind from the article: "...But they also creatively perform how they can be; their hopes and aspirations, the achievement of personal and social connection. Perhaps this is why the experience feels so good to them." This was not only the act of them expressing themselves in a larger group situation, both in rehearsals or performance, but also a way for the community to accept the members, to be given insight into the emotions and lives of the members, and an opportunity for the community to provide encouragement, even if is only verbal after the performance! What a beautiful experience to witness.
Although this article addressed scenarios that I am both familiar and unfamiliar with, I would like to address that there is no mention of the role of the music therapist in this article; is the therapist a facilitator, an organizer, whomever they are needed to be at any given moment? Is the Music therapist active in the performance moment or only in the preparation? How much does the therapist contribute, and is this something that does not require a music therapist (which could therefore imply that it is not music therapy at all)?
This article has certainly provided food for thought for not only myself, but I hope also for the entire music therapy community, and I hope to hear more from the author again soon!
I read with delight Gary Ansdell's theoretical paper on Community Music Therapy. I am an equivalency student at the University of Louisville pursuing a second career in music therapy. When I entered the program in 2003, I had never heard of Community Music Therapy. I assumed, as Dr. Ansdell describes traditional music therapy practice, that therapy takes place behind closed doors in privacy, and that performance has no place in its paradigm. This I accepted, though reluctantly, for I left a very satisfying job as a church choir director in order to prepare for my new career. I looked upon my choir experience, wistfully, as a closed chapter of my life. However, now I am learning about Community Music Therapy, and my hopes are stirred. Maybe, just maybe, I can blend two of my passions: directing a choir and practicing music therapy.
During my ten year stint as choir director, I had a gut feeling that what was occurring was therapeutic. In light of my discovery of Community Music Therapy, I now ask myself, " What were the elements of the experience that made it so?" For I realize that although the " performances" were transformative, as Ansdell described, much more was at stake. For purposes of this response, I am not addressing the spiritual aspects of the choir. I am focusing on the aspects of community that developed. And community was what was at stake. Community development is a long and arduous process. We were a largely unskilled group of musicians. Some read music, most did not. Some had previous choir experience. Most did not. Occasionally we had a talented soloist. Some years we did not. What held us together was our feeling of community. We ate in each others' homes once a month, we practiced diligently, we looked out for each other in times of need, we laughed and cried together, the stronger singers encouraged the weaker ones. The long-time members shepherded the newcomers. Somehow, we succeeded in consistently sounding good, and when we didn't, we sang with so much heart that no one cared about the mistakes. As one choir member said, "Week after week we show up thinking, 'there's no way we can do this' and then we get up in church and DO it!" This is reminiscent of the title of Dr. Ansdell's paper: Being who you aren't, doing what you can't. We held yearly coffee house style open microphone concerts in the church that we called "A Little Night Music". We traveled to other churches in our community and presented workshops on how to start a choir like ours. We produced (in our church basement) and sold a recording of our best numbers and donated the proceeds to the sanctuary building fund. We were invited to perform at our university's concert hall on a special showcase of sacred music. We provided the special music for diocesan-wide meetings at our mountain retreat center. This was a special choir that existed for ten years with consistent leadership and many members' commitment, but I emphasize that we were a rag-tag bunch, not unlike the Musical Minds group in the London's East End.
What were the therapeutic benefits of participation in our choir that correspond to the Musical Minds experience?
Dr. Ansdell, you have given me much to think about. I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on those very rewarding ten years of my life, and to explore my experience as a choir director from a therapeutic perspective. So, inasmuch as we are the sum total of all our experiences, I now face a happy challenge: to integrate Community Music Therapy, the seeds of which were unwittingly sown years ago in the choir, into my future career as a music therapist.