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

From time to time over the early Summer, despite having the requisite protection, birds would fly down the chimney and flutter and flap against the glass doors at the East end of the lounge room. In order to liberate these guests, I would have to go around the outside of the house and open the glass doors for them to fly away. One morning I heard the familiar sounds that heralded the arrival of a new bird.

This time the sounds accompanying the bird's entry into the room were somewhat different. This bird had flown towards the windows at the West end of the room and was clattering among the glass objects on the window sill. Uncertain what to do, I paused in the hall for a moment. As I waited, the bird flew off toward the other end of the room. I heard the unmistakable sound of a smack against the glass doors and all went silent. I crept slowly into the room and saw the bird lying there dead. Completely horrified I looked at that little bird and cried and cried for every dead thing, for every loss, for every dejected and desolate moment.

In this telling of a story from my recent experience I want to highlight the potential for events in our lives to be experienced as having meanings and connections that go beyond what appears to be immediate and relevant. On one level in the story I wept for the dead bird and the sad moment (and perhaps my own guilt at not being able to organise to free the bird as I had others) but I actually also experienced my crying as being about a wider world of sadness of which I was suddenly made aware by this event.

Our human experiences and our responses to them seem to have their own unlimited potential for reference. We have a great capacity to attribute meaning, to project and/or express our feelings; in particular through the use of symbols that either we seek out with some deliberation - such as the lighting of the candle, our 'lucky' piece of jewellery, the talisman we hang from the rear view mirror; or are presented to us at certain times through unexpected events. We seem to need our objects and symbols as memory or reminder but we also seem unable to resist using them also to represent aspects of our experiences of loss, fear or love.

Since many of my experiences make sense of the above statement, I am often curious about why some music therapists seem to be so anti-representational. In extreme forms of this perspective, the view is taken that music cannot represent or symbolize anything. Music is experienced as music. By comparison it makes me think of some of the discomfort I felt at times in my Level 1 GIM training when attributed symbolism of certain pieces of music and certain images were suggested to us. Somehow I like to think we can be open to a mid way between these positions staying responsive to what our patients are teaching us about their own individual experiences of doing the work they need in music therapy.

In my own work as a therapist, it has been important and fascinating to listen to what patients do with their experiences of music. Sometimes patients seem to have intense emotional experiences listening to or playing or singing music because of memories the music elicits about events or people. Other times it seems that it is the experience of being 'in' music that is moving and sometimes helpful. Many people I have worked with seem able to use music as they need; interpreting, projecting, internally symbolizing or playing with feelings and ideas that are brought into conscious awareness by their musical experience. These can find expression through the music we discover together in improvisation or that which is chosen for singing or listening. Sometimes these are cogent, readily expressed experiences, other times I can be left wondering what happened in the session and the music and of course there are times that this remains a mystery.

What is therapeutic about therapy I have come to think is the special type of listening and learning that can occur between the therapist and the client. Like many of my colleagues, I have been quite influenced in this perspective by the ideas of the psychoanalyst Patrick Casement in relation to notions around the therapist as listener and learner (Casement, 2002,1990,1985). Given listening is a cornerstone of our interaction with our patients, I think that we have unlimited potential to use our listening to learn about our patients and to reflect back this learning musically and verbally in ways that clients can find quite helpful.

I suggest that we might need to take care in music therapy that we do not become too rigid in proposing what it is we are supposed to be hearing or not hearing in our patients playing and I wonder that if we do not also take the trouble to listen to what our clients - those who can tell us in words - have to say about their experiences then surely this limits some of the potential for what we can learn with and about them?

I'll leave you with words from an essay written by Chris Handran for a cycle of six installations called 'Remember Me' by Susan Fereday at the Institute for Modern Art in Brisbane, 2001-2002. This extract comes from the essay written for the installation 'After Image (I am What Remains)'.

All events, in their passing, leave traces; burned into images, imprinted on surfaces, or ingrained in memory. The traces that remain (that become remains) memorialise this past presence, and.it is in attempting to preserve these moments in time that we inevitably demonstrate the impossibility of such an act of preservation; what is made more tangible is not the thing itself, but its absence.

(Handran, 2001)

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Barbara Wheeler, PhD, MT-BC, Professor and
Director of Music Therapy, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA for feedback on an early draft of the paper.

References

Casement, P. (2002). Learning from our mistakes: Beyond dogma in psychoanalysis
and psychotherapy. London: Routledge.

Casement, P. (1990). Further learning from the patient. London: Routledge.

Casement, P. (1985). On learning from the patient. London: Tavistock Publications.

Handran, C. (2001). In Fereday, S. Catalogue: Remember Me. Brisbane, Australia:
IMA

How to cite this page

Edwards, Jane (2003). About Meaning: Birds, Deaths and Dogmas. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 15, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2003-about-meaning-birds-deaths-and-dogmas