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

Earlier this week I sat in a locked ward at the local adult psychiatric hospital, observing two music therapy students in a group music therapy session with women suffering from severe psychotic conditions, and deeply medicated. The session began with all talking at once, apparently not understanding each other and constantly getting up and sitting down, moving around the circle and swapping places.

Janine, the student, strummed on the guitar picking up the group tempo and dynamic, and gradually built up the intensity of her playing in a way that managed to catch the women's energy. She eventually pulled them all together into an African greeting song. On the second beat of the song, two women got up and started dancing and stamping, and the rest moved their bodies in that exquisitely mobile African way. The session continued in a vein of offering to, and receiving music from, one another, much of it unknown to the students but carried by the women, who took us on a powerful, generous and vibrant journey of singing and dancing and music-making.

These moments are treasures; they are the sacred generosity of this extraordinary Continent. They happen all the time.

Two other students were in tears last week: one of the children with whom they have worked for the past three months died at the weekend. He had AIDS.

I was at a meeting yesterday with the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, the Head of the School for the Arts, and the Head of the Music Department at the University of Pretoria. We discussed the possibility of setting up a multi-disciplinary clinic on campus, since some community placements are in dangerous areas, and communities are warning students not to go and work there.

This week I met with the Director of the UBUBELE Centre for African psychotherapy - at the edge of Alexandra township in Johannesburg. We discussed how music therapy might fit in with local community needs. UBUBELE's research into nurseries and crèches is yielding stories of children left in shacks with young out-of-work adults who sleep much of the time and have no training in looking after young children's needs... The director tells me of mothers who, in lieu of paying school fees, come to UBUBELE's nursery school and stay there all week, helping out and wanting to be involved in their children's future. Can we think about music therapy with no instruments at all? He asks.... Can we think about a mutual music-making context where we learn from one another and develop a community-based practice? Can we think about training barefoot-music therapists?

As I write this at home, on a Friday evening at the end of a long week, I can hear singing somewhere: it is a group singing outside, possibly a church gathering under one of the magnificent trees in our area.... Last weekend my partner and I were invited to a wedding feast: an all night song-and-dance event invoking the spirits and collecting us towards the ceremony on Sunday morning somewhere out in the bush. We could not make it. It was an honour to be asked.

This year is my tenth year in South Africa as a music therapist. Both continue to kindle my passion.

How to cite this page

Pavlicevic. Mércèdes (2001) Moments. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2001-moments