Voices ResourcesA website for the worldwide community around the journal Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy

The other day, my husband and I had a long chat about our twin children who are to be born soon, just like any new parents-to-be, full of hope and concern. In this complex world, what is the best education we can give them? - especially in Japan where the traditional and progressive value systems are mixed, the economy is loosing its former power, but no significant natural resources exist?

The first thing that came to my mind was that I want my children to be persons who can unite the fragmented world, which is becoming increasingly dominated by superficial individualism. To do so, they need to be peaceful and accepting, deeply thoughtful and even philosophical. But only being thoughtful can be merely naive, and it is not enough. To survive and to be effective, they must have realistic skills and the power to produce things for the world. How can we lead them to be both a peaceful/accepting and winning/strong human-beings? Can these two values co-exist?

There were different impressions between my husband who works as a scientific researcher in a company which constantly requires him to be productive and economically effective, and me who works in the music therapy field where any work step starts from accepting the "non-productive but peaceful/beautiful" people as they are.

Also, for us it was a little bit of a mind-shaking experience, to know that our feelings slightly change depending on the children's sexes. Traditionally, Japanese boys were educated to be strong enough to win a good social position to support their families, and girls to be accepting and supportive. Lately this pattern has been changed and more and more girls choose to educate themselves as leaders. On the other hand, boys are sometimes criticized that they are too gentle and irresponsible in "protecting" women and children. (In reality, however, very few men dare to take paternity leave from their work, and capable women have to either quit their jobs or become super women to do both of work and child-raising, since the public day care systems are poor....but this is another discussion.)

Some of the readers might see here the confrontation between the patriarchal value and the matriarchal value. I have no space to go into the deep sociological discussion in this article, but yes, I often encounter this confrontation or even contradiction in human-beings' activities including my own way of living.

Contrasting attitudes between a winning/strong attitude and a peaceful/accepting one can be found in music therapy work too. As the field of music therapy grew in Japanese society as I wrote in the inaugural issue of Voices, we started to come across many realistic conflicts. One of the biggest conflicts exists between the facility (employer/other professional staff) and the music therapist(s) who work there. Often my students and professional beginners complain about the lack of understanding of the facility for music therapy:
"I got a position but it is a volunteer work with no (or very little)payment."
"The facility requires us to handle 50 elderly people in one group. They just expect us to do a recreation or 'baby sitting' hour."
"They don't provide a budget to purchase the necessary instruments."
"They don't count preparation/evaluation time as the working hours."
"We are not allowed to see the medical records, because they regard us as outsiders."

"Other professionals are jealous of the good relationship between the music therapists and the clients," and on, and on.

Some ask me how they can win a better position and better understanding in order to work more smoothly as a professional music therapist ("I want to win this race"). On the other hand, some simply give up being professionally better, starting to convince themselves like, "well, I am just fine with this volunteering position...After all, what I like is the time I spend with my clients..." ("I step out of this race.")

Now, my opinion is that these two attitudes are both unhealthy, because both are misunderstanding what "winning" means. First of all, we need to think what we should win, and what is the essential aim of our work. What music therapy kind of work aims to win is not a "race."

Presently I work as a music therapist at an elderly residential facility which I created two and half years ago. I am more or less satisfied with the working conditions and the understanding from the facility: I can keep a certain professional quality by running one small group and 7-8 individual session in two days a week with three assistants; payment is not perfect but OK, and we have reasonable equipment; communication with other staff is pretty smooth too. At least I don't have any of above mentioned problems. In a way, I "won" a good music therapist position here. However, it took time and creativity to come here.

What I was careful about in the process of creating this position was 1) non-competitive, non-threatening attitude to the existing staff; 2) not too much verbal explanation to convince people what music therapy is, but acting and showing the result first; 3) involving other fields' staff in the experience of effective music therapy sessions, (also, often they overheard the good things about music therapy from the clients' family members); 4) then, clear and theoretical verbal explanation of what happened; and 5) lastly but very importantly requesting the necessary environmental equipment. It worked well, and I think the main point of this process was "how can we be sensitive about existing staff's feelings." I tried to be constantly aware and respect " how they would feel if we did this." In a way, it was a similar attitude of a therapist to a client.

This attitude gradually led music therapy staff and other staff to share feelings, including the direction on how we want to care for our common clients.
Needless to say, care workers, nurses and other staff are very busy with their physical/mental work. I can understand that sometimes they want to be a little sarcastic about music therapist's work which is only happy, non-critical to physically live/die, therefore non-important. Those kinds of feelings actually existed first in my case too. But what happened after that was that music therapy played a role to remind them what they really wanted to do in their daily care work--to respect clients' individual history and life, to accept them as they are, and to improve their lives as human-beings, not just to let them live longer or to compensate for what is lacking in their physical abilities. Of course they had known these concepts before music therapists came, but it could become just an idealistic slogan in their daily work. When they saw that it could be realized in music therapy, they seemed to allow themselves to feel what they wanted to feel. In a way, music gave them an opportunity to have that courage and release. Then they accepted us as the professionally independent colleagues, and became cooperative in a real sense.

When I present the clinical cases of this facility in music therapy conferences and lectures in Japan, some audience react, "Well, it can be possible only in a lucky, wealthy facility like yours." I used to think that way too: "music is a kind of luxury activity". But reviewing my work now, I am struck by how little budget we need than what people generally image. Of course our work needs certain expenses, but not so much as people tend to think to give a high-quality caring music time which really respects the individual's life.

I think the key is to be creative not in order to win the better music therapist's position, but to become a uniter to make people aware what good work they are already doing. To do that, the main music therapist should be committed to become a practical resource to realize everybody's benefit in a wholistic way: facility management, other staff members, clients, clients' family, music therapy staff, (interns).... If only one or two of these people won their benefits, for example, music therapy staff's benefit, it might go well at first, but would slow down sooner or later, since there would be negative energy born in the wholistic circle. But if we can run this circulating energy in a positive way by respecting others' benefits, music therapy will live too. To make this circulation work well, our main resource, music can be one of the best nurturers, because it is non-verbal. No matter what we do in our work, we should act with "musical" quality--that is, not to give up and shut up but express and make changes happen, not to stand against the opposing forces but to create a chance to communicate, not to force a totalitarian unity but to facilitate a harmony with each other's unique elements, and to become the center of everybody's most sublime part resounding, not the egos. And our task is not to play my own music loudly, but to listen to the music of people around us first. What we need to win in our work is this dynamics, and then the position is naturally given.

How to cite this page

Ikuno, Rika (2001) How to Win in Music Therapy Work?. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2001-how-win-music-therapy-work