Interview with Margaret Daniell

By Ruth Bright

How I met Margaret Daniell

I had met Margaret Daniell a few times before the interviews took place which this report describes; the first meeting was in 1975, when she came to Australia on a family visit and was invited to be the first-ever ‘Visiting Speaker’ at the first-ever Australian music therapy conference, at which AMTA, the Australian Music Therapy Association, was launched. At that conference she spoke – most inspiringly – of her work with children in Berlin. In subsequent years, while in Australia to visit her family she also attended AMTA conferences in Adelaide and Brisbane.

Some years later (in 1981) I had been on a lecturing/study tour to various European hospitals and clinics, and spent several days in Berlin; there I stayed with Margaret (and enjoyed talking about all kinds of things, not just ‘music therapy’, and learned much from seeing her at work with children in a psychiatric hospital.

My own work at that time was shared between acute psychiatry, (this goes back to January 1960, in South Australia- but continued in New South Wales) and aged care - both rehabilitation and long-term work - and I was also involved in the services provided for children and young adults in group homes and in a permanent-care children’s unit in my own part of Sydney.

Seeing Margaret at work, therefore, was not only enthralling but also had practical value for my own endeavours, because it supported my view that, for many people with acute or chronic mental illnesses, the conditions probably had their roots in childhood, when the children would not have been recognised as being ‘ill’ – but seen as ‘naughty’, or ‘difficult’.

Margaret and I met again, in Paris in 1983, at a European Conference of Music Therapy, which was attended by people from USA and UK as well as from several European countries.

Early in 2010, I had been asked by the American Music Therapist, Barbara Wheeler, whether I would interview Margaret for “Voices”, and the report which follows is the fruit of that request/invitation – which I saw as both a responsibility and a privilege.

From Performance, Via Teaching, to Music Therapy

On Wednesday, April 28th, 2010, Margaret and I talked for some time about her life in music therapy, with preliminary reminiscence about our earlier meetings over the years. Our more formal discussions, or "two-way conversation", began when I asked what stimulus started her off in what proved to be an interesting and successful career.

It all started in 1954, she said, when she was in Italy (as part of a trip to see the world), where she did a language course. Her original plan (for major training) was to study the flute, and she was allowed to apply for a course in Vienna. I asked her how she had become sufficiently fluent in German to be able to undertake a course, and the reply was that she did this by working with a family in Villach (Austria) in order to teach them English, this was especially helpful for the eldest daughter (whose school education had been impaired by the war).

Rather to her surprise, Margaret was accepted for the flute course, which was to start in September 1959, but this made it necessary to earn some extra money to buy an instrument! This she did by working in Guernsey (in the Channel Island) during the Summer break, and then went back to Vienna saying “Well, here I am!”, and started the course.

Family needs took her (reluctantly!) back to Australia for a while, but she returned to Vienna and switched from flute to the recorder in order to do a course to qualify her as a music teacher (the recorder was at that time very much used in schools). I was interested to know what direction this course took and learned that, initially, Margaret entered the performance stream, but later changed to the teaching stream of study. Then, in 1965, her professor suggested that she should take the music therapy course, saying that she would find it interesting. At that stage she had no idea what music therapy was (her reaction, she said, could be expressed as “Huh??”

- "He must have realised that you would be good with people – and perhaps he was also impressed by your language skills?" I commented. There was a rather tentative mmm in response! That course ended in 1969.

- “But the course was not a bit what I had expected,” she said, “it was more like the sort of Occupational Therapy that nurses used to do in Australia at that time – music was just to keep you occupied.”

-"That reminds me of a confrontation I had in Sydney in the early 1960s– not exactly a row but a strong difference of opinion when I said that music therapy was to help people to express themselves, to change - not just to fill in time." Margaret nodded in agreement.

- “People always think that a course in Vienna must be based on psychoanalysis; when I came home via USA everyone assumed that – but, at that stage, it wasn’t. But,” she went on, “when you live in Vienna, psychoanalysis is something you sort of breathe in with the air!” Margaret said that there was some scientific emphasis in the course – for example they had lectures on statistics, but she quoted the professor as saying that he did not care about exams - he just wanted to be sure that the students knew what he was talking about!

Influences from Nordoff and Robbins

I knew that her work had been influenced by Nordoff and Robbins, and asked how this came about. - “One of the professors knew about them, and another therapist had one of their books so I learned about their approach.”

Working with Children

- “What about employment? Did people expect to pay you? Or did they assume that you would be a volunteer?”

- “No, they didn’t think that. But when I was in Vienna I told one professor that I would like to work with him, and I worked for a while, but was told that foreigners could not be employed because there was not enough money to pay their own team!”

-“What kind of work, what population had you been working with?”

-“The professor had a clinic for disturbed children, and I had decided – right from the beginning – that I wanted to work with children. But I wanted to come home for a while and had intended to come via America, and bought my ticket, but I didn’t get my Visa! I was in London at the time and the American Consulate there refused, so I had to get letters of invitation”.

- “But it all took time and, while I was waiting, I decided to go back to Berlin to a conference, and there I met Dr Wilms and he was going to employ another music therapist from Vienna, so he got in touch with the person who ran a children’s psychiatric clinic. He, naturally, had been to America, where - of course – they had music therapy; he did not have a music therapist but was keen to have one, and he said he would let me know.

So I went off to America and then on to Australia, and – six months later – I got a telegram that had been sent to my address in Vienna – to tell me to start on the first of January!! But he did employ me - not for an actual position in Music Therapy because there wasn’t one! But he took bits from other jobs!”

- “Did you find that the other professionals were cross at having hours taken away to give to you?”

- “No, it was social workers.” “I’ve always worked closely with social workers, and I can’t imagine that they’d too snorty about having hours taken away for something worthwhile?”

- “I’ve been wondering whether the work you did matched any of the training you’d been given in the course?”

- “Well, the experience I had did sort of put me in the right place, but the work itself – I always focused all the work around the child, so I didn’t think ‘Well, treatment number 4 would suit this child’.”

- “I find it almost shocking that your approach, centring your work around the child’s needs, was seen in Germany as – well – almost unique!”

- “Well, I was influenced by Robbins and Nordoff.”

- "Have you always worked with children?”

- “Well, in my first year, ‘children’ meant up to 21.”

- “So it included adolescents as well. You’d use a slightly different approach with adolescents, I imagine!”

Brief discussion followed on the attention span of children of different ages.

- “I was working mainly with young children, where contact was difficult, and music is really the only medium which will reach them. But afterwards we had forensic patients and I found that it worked well with them too.”

Glimpse of Methods Used: Making Music Together

- “In what way? Can you describe what you did? Did you play instruments together, use improvisation……?”

- “Well, you can’t base everything on one case, but I had one case which was impressive, a young man. His parents had both given up on him. But his father was waking up to the fact that there was something wrong and did come occasionally to visit him. He had tried to murder his mother and of course everyone else was frightened of him and he had in fact used an Axe. After the initial contact period I had some ideas, and used one of those Japanese drums, I thought the action of that would help – and we used to play the drum together. (Margaret explained that the movement was similar to that of using an axe but using it to play music would transform it from a destructive action to a creative one.) I would take his musical themes and rhythms, and use them as the basis for making music together.”

- “He didn’t transfer any of his feelings towards you in doing that?”

- “No! Not at all! In working with forensic patients, I was always aware that one might find oneself on the receiving end, when people project their emotions onto the therapist. With young children, if they had problems with their mothers, I used to find that there it was often carried over.”

Returning to the topic of the work done with the young man, I heard how Margaret used to walk with him through the woods, talking to him as they walked - something his parents had never done, in fact she came to believe that they had failed to do anything, even in childhood, to help him develop an identity.

Moving on to another aspect of her work, Margaret said: - “When interviewing parents, the Boss, if he had difficulties, used to get me to come and entertain the child underneath his desk!”

- “What on earth did you do – take a soft instrument under there?”

- “No, I used to take a toy! The work of a music therapist is very varied, isn’t it!” Some laughter and exchange of ideas followed in which we talked about what the psychiatrist thought was happening under his desk!

Musical Assessments

- “When you look back over your years of work, are there things you recall as special turning points?”

- “I found it fascinating that I seemed to be able to think more quickly, work out what was happening without using psychological tests, to find out whether the child was backward or…or emotionally disturbed. I found it fascinating that I seemed to be able to think more quickly, work out what was happening without using psychological tests, to find out whether the child was backward or … or emotionally disturbed.”

“Do you think it is because – as a musician- you have to be very sensitive to what you are doing, and this makes you more sensitive to what is happening inside people ?”

- “I think it is the music itself, especially if children have never had any music before. I’ve had children who would scream when the doctor came near them, in white coats, but not with music.”

“I’ve had that experience too when working in a children’s ward – kids terrified of staff in uniform but welcoming me with my piano accordion as I went from one cot or bed to the next!"

- “Yes, it is the music.”

Here I disagreed somewhat, and said “But it is the person too, not just the music – a record (i.e. left with the child, not played by a therapist) would not be the same!”

Margaret agreed and went on: - “I have been fascinated, time and time again, by what you could do with sound. You asked about special memories: I had a 5-year-old girl as a patient, she wasn’t walking and wasn’t talking; her grandmother brought the child because she was sure that the child was not retarded. It was quite a trip for them twice a week, and - in six months – I had her playing tunes with me, the girl didn’t talk with me, but she talked with her grandmother as soon as the session was over, and she was walking too."

- “I still think, Margaret, that it wasn’t just the music because you had to know how to use the music, what music to use and so on!”

Building a Music Therapy Course in Berlin

“During your working life, have you noticed any changes in music therapy as a profession? (You said, that when you started, they were using it more as an occupational therapist might use it?)

- “Well- with all these psychotherapies and so on, I think one should have some knowledge about them all, this helps one to have a deeper understanding of human frailties.”

- “Yes, I know what you mean - I always describe my work as eclectic, because I believe that we need to take different approaches to meet the needs of different people. ……

- "What about changes in the profession as a whole?”

- “Well, one of the big changes is that there are so many more of us!” Some shared laughter about this and our thankfulness for being less alone!

- “Did you get support and understanding from the people with whom you worked?"

- “Well - my second boss, an Italian, a Jungian, he was a neurologist as well as a psychiatrist, - he was very keen on anything creative in his clinic.”

- “What about coping with any challenging patients? We hear a lot today about the need for Supervision, did you have anyone you could off-load things to, if someone really got you down?”

- “I think you’ve probably hit on the most important thing that has changed: I didn’t have anybody like that, no. But when I started running a course, it was different and a lot of help came from that.”

- “That was in Berlin?”

- “Yes, in 1984”.

- “How ‘big’ was the course?”

“Karen Schumacher and I started the course, but at first we were just offering subjects, it wasn’t a real ‘Course’. You could just do subjects, but eventually it grew into a real course.

- “Is the course still going?”

- “O yes”,

- “It was a tremendous task!”

- “O yes, you see there was another course in Berlin, an anthroposophists’ course in therapeutic music, but they were not recognised officially by the Government – but our course was. So there was all this fighting that went on about what was or wasn’t music therapy. It went on for ages and ages!”

- “It probably still does! You still get people who call themselves Music Therapists but all they are doing is turning on records!”

“Was it extra difficult because of the divisions in Berlin due to the wall – you‘ve already mentioned the woman who brought her grandchild from ‘the other side’?"

- “O yes, the wall did make a difference. For example, Karen and I had been offering special courses for a long time for people who worked in social occupations, and when the Wall came down things were different. For example, nurses studied at the University in the East but they didn’t in the West, and the Social Work course didn’t have anything creative in it at all. Many things had to be changed ‘from the ground up’. I was asked to help, and I ran a preliminary course in what was then East Berlin, it meant driving over 100 Kilometres, and I took one of my students with me. I was not sure what they expected from me, and - as I drove along, - I said to the student that I felt as if I had a suitcase with me but didn’t know what I was going to unpack from it! When I got there I said more or less the same thing to the person who met me, “But I can tell you how I work and this may help!’ So I started, and they thought it was wonderful! They said “If we had someone who had only studied music, it would not have been the same!”

I spoke briefly about referrals from social workers who could see that those people needed something as well as words and knew that music therapy ‘worked’.

Needs of Disabled People

Going on from what our discussion of the need for extra ways of communicating, Margaret talked about the needs of handicapped people. “I think one of the problems in Australia is that people think that all you need to do is teach them.”

- “Actually, there are many Australian music therapists who do more than that, and centres for autism where music therapy is a big part of the programme, with really creative work being done…... Is it the general public you are thinking about or other professions?” “It’s the government, I think! The Parents’ society I worked for were very quick to take on anything which really worked.” “Parents of autistic children here are active too, but they often need extra money – perhaps the government doesn’t do as much as it could…..!”

Diversity in Approaches: Music and Empathy

- “What sort of things would you say about music therapy as a whole?”

- “It is a very interesting profession to have – [pause] – I’m sorry! - the trouble is that all my thinking about music therapy is in German!" After a brief pause, she went on: - “It is valuable because it takes into account a whole lot of different things.”

- “Wholistic?”

- “No, not wholistic, or yes, it is wholistic, but what I meant was that there are so many different aspects of it"

- “Different ways of doing things?”

- “Yes.”

- “That fits in with what I said before about being eclectic – we ask ourselves ‘What approach does this person need?’ “

- ”I use instruments to make contact, it’s not just psychological approaches. One of the subjects in our course was on using percussion instruments. I’d gone through stages, I’d played the piano and the flute but I’d been using percussion instruments too, and I did a special training course.”

- “It seems simple to play percussion instruments!”

- “Yes - but they’ve got to be played as music. In my last year, I had one student and – in the whole year – I had never got her to play percussion instruments. If ever she wanted to express things, she always went to the piano – nowadays, I wouldn’t have taken that girl on, because you need to express the music of the client, not your own. …..Going on from there, when I was interviewing people who wanted to do the course, I would refuse anyone who only played the piano, or only played the guitar, you need to play other instruments” (Pause for thought.)

- “How long did you see the children for – just a few weeks?”

- “O no, sometimes it was months or even years."

- “They were not in hospital all that time were they?”

- “O no!"

- “Did you ever do home visits?”

- “No.”

- “So were you able to involve the parents in sessions?”

- “Anyone who was in the room, (except the grandmother) - I wouldn’t let them just look on, they had to play an instrument! The girl (who was with her grandmother) played the gong.

Following up the theme of diversity, Margaret described her use of water in sessions. - “You see, we had a small swimming pool and the Grandmother I mentioned before sat with the child on her lap, to watch the other children play in the pool. When the child saw me, singing a song and holding up my arms to her, she just came into the water and straight into my arms. When the child’s father came and saw her playing with the other children, he cried.”

- “That use of water in music therapy is all quite new to me!”

- “The other therapists and I shared quite a lot of children in sessions, working together, so that, for example, if a child had difficulty walking up stairs, I would play music to go with the movement. Some of them were the same children that I also had for music therapy sessions. We called it [in German] ‘Bases’ therapy. We’d sometimes have a child in a blanket, swinging to and fro, and I would sing a song. Sometimes I would do movements in the swimming pool and I would sing a song for the movement,

- “Songs you had made up yourself?”

- “Yes.”

Improvising Songs

I wondered whether the songs were impromptu, so would be difficult to repeat, and asked: “Did you use the songs more than once?”

- “O yes! Most of the songs were improvised, except when it was with children of about 10 who were mad about some special song. ….. I remember one boy who wanted to play ‘Fur Elise’ for his mother, it took him 6 months but eventually he managed it! But I didn’t usually do that, although I would ‘borrow’ bits of things [things = compositions] Shared laughter!

- “Outside the pool, these children were totally dependent, but in the water they moved their hands and so on, and experienced movement much more, because – in the water – you have to push. [Margaret demonstrated the "pushing", which is not needed in the open air.] But on climbing out of the water, the children were initially not able to move, but gradually they learned to be more independent.”

- “With one girl, whose usual behaviour was to lie on the floor and roll from side to side -, I got down on all fours…

- "To be at her level?"

- ”Yes! I then picked her up and put her on the chair at the piano, and she reached forward and started to play. There was nothing advanced about it, but when I played two notes, she played two, and so on”

- “It conjures up a wonderful picture, Margaret!”

- “She had a sense of humour, and used to play tricks on me too. If I had played two notes for quite a long time, she would suddenly play three!”

- “So she was able to be inventive!”

- “Oh yes, absolutely, and it showed her capacity for independence too!”

- “It sounds as if you were reaching something deep down, below the surface?”

“She started talking after a while. We weren’t aware of it at first - but we found she loved big words [Pause] One of the things I often think about is whether the changes we see in people through music therapy can be transferred to other life situations.”

This is a big issue for me, as a therapist: of course changes that are achieved in music sessions are good anyway, giving self-esteem and self-expression, but - if the changes can affect the person’s life as a whole - the benefits are even greater.

“Yes, I’m sure they do - I am sure they do get transferred. I worked with a group of pre-pubic boys (when working in groups, I never had more than five) who could not be taught in ordinary school, but music therapy enabled them to learn to take turns, listen to others. So I used to play on the drums, reflecting their movements back to them, but - if I played to them – they had to play for me!”

- “And did this alter any of their relationships outside the group?”

- “Yes it did.” But I always changed to individual work at puberty, because I found that groups were uncontainable in puberty.

Here our discussion focused for a few moments on the (non-music therapy) tests and assessments which are done, and Margaret’s comments were that they were useful but not enough on their own: - “You have to work out how can you use the information – can difficult behaviour be changed - or is it a permanent state?”

[Back to the boys again!] - “I remember a boy of about 12 who was in the group, the things he used to do..!. If I played quickly, he would run around quickly, and so on, he was very active in his responses! His carer came to me after a few weeks and asked what I was doing because the boy used to come home exhausted! He would lie down on his bed, and he never did that otherwise! Was that seen as a bad thing or a good thing? I think it was a good thing that he was tired because he had been doing something for himself. So often they don’t have the chance to do something for themselves.”

Towards the end of the conversation, I asked Margaret whether she had ever found (as some Music Therapists have) that parents of autistic children find it so painful when someone outside the family is able to communicate with their child – when they themselves have not been able to do so – that they are deeply hurt and sometimes even withdraw the child from music therapy.

Her response demonstrated (once more!) her capacity for empathy. - “I have had that problem sometimes, but I always tell them that it doesn’t mean anything – it is the music, not me, that does it. ‘There are two different things’, I tell them – ‘what I can do and what music can do’. Through music I can usually make contact on the first day, but it takes me as long as it takes the parents to get the child actually to do anything I want.” [About withdrawing a child from music therapy] “I think that any parent of a developmentally disturbed child could feel like that!”

The Importance of Mentoring

- “This has been a marvellous conversation, Margaret – so interesting! Was it painful when you left Berlin?”

- “Yes it was! –I had to retire because of the age limit. But I could still do some teaching and mentoring.”

After some brief discussion, Margaret said: “I think that mentoring is perhaps the most significant thing that has happened in music therapy in recent years.”

Not long after the initial interview we had a second conversation, to enlarge some of the topics from our first conversation, and Margaret gave me the translation of a paragraph from a booklet (which she had shown me during our original discussion) about the work of the unit. In that paragraph she had discussed the responses of clients to music therapy.

“Music needs no words. Everyone carries hidden musical abilities within them that surface during music therapy. Listening and playing around with sounds, melodies and rhythms leads to communication without words. This facilitates contact when speech is not possible. Through improvisation with things that make sounds, their own creative expressions are awakened. The experiences of feelings and their own personality cause their own impetus and needs to emerge, which can then be worked on and developed in the safe environment of the music therapy session.”

Summary

Our two conversations, which lasted about three hours in all, demonstrated what I already knew (both from seeing Margaret at work and hearing her speak), that her work is skilfully-based on a combination of music and empathy, together with a background of deep knowledge and an understanding of children’s problems and needs. Her musicianship and knowledge are clearly essential parts of this, but – without empathy – those skills could not reach people as they do.

Through her skills and her empathic understanding of inner needs, Margaret Daniell communicates with the children through music therapy in such a way that the children’s lives are made more liveable.

It has been for me a privilege to know her, and to talk with her about her work. 1 (‘two-way conversation’ would probably be more accurate!)