Safety Notes

By Nelson Falcão de Oliveira Cruz

I intend to briefly present the concept that I proposed in the II Latin American Music Therapy Meeting (this initial proposal is published on the Revista Brasileira de Musicoterapia. See references on CRUZ, 2000.) in 1998 and later developed in my finishing course paper (this is the whole work, and it was published, in Portuguese, at http://www.ubam.hpg.com.br/html/docs/cruz_notas.htm) in 2000.

During my clinical practice (still as a trainee) I realized that one of my patients used to repeat some notes - one or two per session. After he got used to these notes, he could begin to try other ones, amplifying his musical vocabulary. Furthermore, the notes that he began repeating became recurrent during the whole improvisation although he distanced from them little by little, needing to resort to them less and less.

Therefore, I have called Safety Notes the ones that, being recurrent and occurring at a strong tempo in the execution of the improvising patient, seemed to provide him a sound/musical home base. These notes also allow the patient to risk using unknown or almost unknown sound/musical paths. At the time that he might need the possibility to resort to it in order to have a feeling of comfort or safety, they might encourage him to subsequently try other sounds.

According to Summer,

"The child's developmental process, called separation-individuation [apud Mahler, Pine & Bergman], begins with the newborn in a symbiotic, dependant relationship with the mother. But, in the early month of life as the child's physical coordination and ego strength increases, he begins to willfully distance himself from the mother. (...) Over the time, the child becomes able to venture further from the mother." (1995, p.37)

Afterwards, Summer states that "Her [the mother] nurturing arms create a feeling of security, an emotional 'home base' from which the child can feel free to explore, as well as to which he can always return." (p. 38) She does an analogy between the holding property of music and the beginning of a GIM session. Summer refers to how the patient feels the music, considering the receptive characteristic of GIM. What I am proposing is an analogy between the way that patients play in a melodic or harmonic/melodic improvisation and the holding property of the music.

My hypothesis is that these Safety Notes play the "good enough mother" role (Winnicott cf. Summer, p. 38), who is neither too sheltering nor too challenging, in a way that the patient can explore new sounds knowing that there is a guaranteed place (by the repetition) where his/her production will always be pleasant - the Safety Notes. When it is said, "explore new sounds", the possibility of exploring the world, the new, which is revealed by the different musical elements in a music therapy session, is indicated.

An Experience of Improvisation

In order to begin to examine this issue, an initial study was done to collect data referring to the Safety Notes. It had the following goals:

Investigating the presence of Safety Notes during melodic improvisations, as well as verifying which degrees appear more frequently as Safety Notes;
Observing how a harmony done by the music therapist can influence the use of Safety Notes in an improvisation;

This study was done with seven first year music therapy students from the Conservatório Brasileiro de Música - Rio de Janeiro. The class of the first year on the music therapy program was chosen due to a practical matter, as I needed a space and material available to the people who would take part in the study. The Conservatório Brasileiro de Música could offer me such conditions. In the room where the experience took place there were:

a piano, with its keyboard shown;
a xylophone;
a metalophone;
a broken organ, and part of a drum - which wasn't part of the experiment.

Only the improviser and myself were present in the room. He or she was told that the organ and the drums weren't part of the experiment, asked to choose any instrument and play freely.

These students were divided, randomly, into two groups. The improvisations from the 1^st group of people were harmonized with the guitar by myself in order to reproduce a sound environment as close as possible to the situation in which I first notice the Safety Notes question - the music therapy setting. The second group had no harmony at all.

Table 1. Table with information from each improvisation.

Name	Harmony	Time improvising	Observations	*Safety Notes*	Instrument used (in order of utilization)
R.G.	No	4'	Wanted to stop just after beginning. 1st contact with the xylophone and the metalophone.	Yes	xylophone and metalophone
R.L.	Yes	8'	1^st contact with the metalophone	Yes	metalophone and piano
A.A.	No	9'		Yes	xylophone and metalophone
A.O.	Yes	9'		Yes	Metalophone
A.E.	No	5'	Didn't sit even to play the xylophone (on the floor). 1^st contact with the xylophone and the metalophone.	No	piano, metalophone and xylophone
E.O.	Yes	6'	Didn't sit even to play the metalophone (on the floor).	No	piano and metalophone
M.A.	No	5'	1^st contact with the xylophone and the metalophone.	Yes	xylophone and metalophone

Some people declared spontaneously that it was their first contact with the xylophone/metalophone. The ones who didn't have this observation didn't say anything about knowing these instruments. Therefore, it doesn't mean that they already knew them.

Table 2. The table shows the total use of Safety Notes, in the number of passages in which it was used.

Degrees	I	II	III	IV	V	VI	VII	Total
# of occurrences of Safety Notes	8	1	-	2	5	1	1	18

Certainly the first degree being the most used as Safety Notes is related to the cultural context. However, would it be just the Western culture that makes us feel this support on the tonic, or could it have some physical/organic influence? I don't have the answer to this question, and I let it to be thought and discussed.

According to Gainza (1983), the men's musical conduct can manifest two tendencies: one imitative - which reproduces or copies existent models; and one creative, that creates its own models. Gainza states:

"It is also possible even to recognize when the person who improvises only rearranges formulae, structures or stereotypes and when, on the contrary, he or she freely explores the sonorous reality achieving new and unexpected forms, incidentally or by a volunteer act [...]" (ibid, p.13).

I noticed that the two people who didn't use Safety Notes improvised in a 'rational way': using 'models' or existing formulae or even playing well-known melodies.

My initial findings were:

Five out of the seven people who participated in the experiment used somewhat the Safety Notes.
All degrees from the scale, excluding the mediant, played the role of the Safety Notes at least once.
The harmony performed by myself, at the guitar, seems to had done no influence on the use or not of Safety Notes, considering that: a) Of the five people who used Safety Notes, two had harmony in their improvisation, and three did not. b) Of the two people who hadn't use this resource, one had harmony, and one did not.

Contradicting my first suppositions, all degrees from the scale, excluding the mediant, played the role of the Safety Notes, at least once. In the beginning of my work, I thought that only the tonic and the dominant could form Safety Notes, and although I had already believed on the possibility of other degrees be well for this purpose, it seemed unlikely that dissonances like the leading note and the supertonic could offer a home base.

Final Considerations:

There is still a lot to consider and research in relation with the possible meaning of how people - and the clients - play music. Each one feels and makes music in a completely particular way. Nevertheless, there are some resources, some musical construction forms, which are more used by some than by others. We cannot generalize, thinking that we shall discover aspects that appear throughout everyone's improvisation, although we can find out some aspects present in some people's musical expression. There is no doubt we can think of this as a result of being included in the same cultural context.

As music therapists, we must try to understand why some people use certain resources to make music. Safety Notes are just one of these aspects, resources to make music that exist in this work. There is a lot to study about Safety Notes. And it is possible that there are other aspects like Safety Notes that can appear in musical improvisations on the music therapy practice.

References:

Cruz, Nelson F. de O. (2001). "Como Pode Um Observador Ajudar O Musicoterapeuta Na compreensão de Uma Sessão?", Revista Brasileira de Musicoterapia. Ano IV, no 5.

Cruz, Nelson F. de O. (2000).Notas de Segurança: Um novo conceito em Musicoterapia? Finishing course paper. Rio de Janeiro: CBM.

Gainza, Violeta (1983). La Improvisación Musical. Buenos Aires:Ricordi.

Summer, Lisa (1995). "Melding Musical and Psychological Processes: The Therapeutic Musical Space" Journal of The Association for Music and Imagery. 4:37-48.