Special Section: In Memory of Clive Robbins 1927-2011

Memories of Clive

By Barbara Hesser

Achieving an integrity between what we believe and how we live is a challenge
worthy of the gift of life. To dive down, find beauty, nurture it and offer it to the world is magnificent.

This statement from an unknown source exemplifies how Clive lived his life. I was so fortunate to know Clive for 38 years. For me Clive was a mentor, a colleague, a dear friend and a neighbor. Clive and I shared so many seminal life events (his and mine) and together we built the Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy at New York University. Our personal/professional relationship has been rich, inspiring, funny, joyful, complex and creative. I am so grateful to have shared so many rich life experiences with him.

I remember so vividly the day in 1974 when I met Clive with Paul Nordoff at the Day Care Unit of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. This was one of the places where they had pioneered their work and Clive was taking pictures of Gail and Herbert Levin for their book Creative Music Therapy. I was so excited to meet these two people who had already so profoundly influenced me. Already a music therapist, I had been training in Paul and Clive’s work with the Levins. I was profoundly influenced by Music Therapy for Handicapped Children (Nordoff & Robbins, 1965) and actually I had thought about leaving the field until I found their little pink book published by Rudolf Steiner Publications. Their writing about music and music therapy and the underlying spiritual underpinnings inspired me then, and they still do.

No matter how much the therapist may know about music, how often he has performed it, how many compositions he has written, he will find the art of music entirely changed, completely different from what he had hitherto understood it to be. All his former knowledge will be refreshed and illumined by the results of his search for the therapeutic possibilities in the art, by his inquiries and his explorations. Thus the world of music opens anew to the therapist, now disclosing an inner musical world of therapeutic potential.

All the elements of music, the idioms of music, the styles of composing evolved during the last seven centuries, the very tones of music themselves, as well as the smallest components of musical structure take on new meanings, become significant in countless, undreamt of ways as the therapist penetrates ever more deeply into the essence of music in his quest for its healing properties. (Nordoff & Robbins, 1965, pp. 15-16)

Little could I imagine that first day what connections would evolve over the coming years. Clive was soon to come to the U.S. to live in Rome, New York and work with Carol Robbins at the New York State School for the Deaf. Our relationship grew during the next years through visits and between times through phone calls and letters. Soon Clive and Carol began teaching during the summers at New York University (NYU). The students looked forward to these classes each year. Although he was English by birth, Clive treasured his American citizenship and loved being with us in New York City and at NYU.

Clive was a great storyteller and he told me many stories over the years. They were fictional, jokes, teaching stories and stories from his life. I loved the rich melodious voice that Clive was blessed with. I particularly loved the Sufi stories he told. The story entitled “The Time, The Place and the People” from the Tales of the Dervishes (I. Shah, 1970, pp.121-125) embodied Clive’s belief in the destiny of the work and that along the way there were propitious turning points when he met the right people at the right time and place. He believed that coming to NYU in 1989 was just such a moment and so do I. I had wanted an American Nordoff-Robbins music therapy center at New York University for a long time. I tried to raise the funds and even found enough money for Clive and Carol to come for one year in 1981. But all these efforts on my part did not work out. Finally in 1988 the Center came to NYU from the newly created Nordoff-Robbins Foundation of America through no effort on my part. I guess we were all ready. Clive and Carol moved to New York from Australia where they had been living and working. They moved into the same apartment building as me and we began to plan the Center. The Nordoff-Robbins work now had an American home and I had new neighbors and colleagues.

What a creative adventure it has been to work side by side with Clive, Carol Robbins, Alan Turry, Ken Aigen and the entire NR staff all these years to create the Center and become a place of treatment, training and dissemination of the work through research and publication. Having the Center at NYU has been such a benefit to the music therapy students in the NYU program who have taken courses, done fieldwork and undertaken internship training there. The Center also became a resource for people from around the US and abroad. The NR approach was already well known at NYU but the chance to know and interact with Clive was a great opportunity. Some of my dearest colleagues from around the world have been involved in the training and practice of NR and the work lives on through us as we continue to help it evolve and develop.

Clive was an international ambassador for music therapy. He loved traveling and spreading the word about Creative Music Therapy. He had traveled the world since the inception of the work and he continued to love exploring responses to the work in other cultures. It was fortunate that he could travel until almost the end of his life and he completed a successful world tour right before getting ill. I had the privilege to travel and teach with Clive many times over the years. Two of our international trips stand out in my mind as seminal. In 1978 Clive was influential in having me invited to the World Symposium of Music Therapy Training in Herdecke, Germany. This was a wonderful event and I made many personal and professional connections through that meeting that have lasted to this day. This was my first international music therapy conference and it was the beginning of my international life in music therapy that continues today. The other trip was more personal. I had the pleasure in 1983 to go to the midlands of England with Clive to meet his mother Dolly and visit Sunfield Children’s Home where the NR work began. It was there I had the privilege to meet Hep Geuter—who Clive called the third member of the Nordoff-Robbins team—who had such a deep spiritual influence on their work.

Clive was a philosopher and a deeply spiritual man. Throughout our relationship we shared our transpersonal beliefs about music, music therapy and life. I spent many an evening talking about anthroposophy and the spiritual underpinnings of his life and work. Besides our informal sharing we had many meetings where we had spiritual discussions in small groups and shared one particular very special gathering in Phoenicia, New York, every summer for seven years. This meeting brought together people with a transpersonal perspective from around the world. During this retreat we all shared a very profound experience and formed a continuing bond. The first summer at Phoenicia I was happy to introduce him to Pat Rodegast who became very important to Clive on his spiritual journey. I encouraged him to write about the spiritual aspects of his work and I was happy that he finally did in A Journey into Creative Music Therapy (Robbins, 2005).

Clive’s perspective on life helped me many times through things that were challenging or difficult in my life. One such day was September 11, 2001. I watched from my apartment window in lower Manhattan as a plane flew into the World Trade Center. I immediately called Clive who had seen the same thing from his apartment three floors below me. He immediately came up and together we watched the second plane hit the towers and the towers fall. We went walking in the streets later together and as we walked downtown toward the devastation I remember Clive told me stories of World War II and what it was like then for him and how this reminded him of that time. His spiritual approach to life was very helpful to me that day particularly. I was with Clive the night that Carol Robbins passed away and, although he was naturally quite sad, he faced her death and illness with spiritual strength and equanimity. He lived his life with that strength. He viewed death and his own death this way and conveyed to me many times that he was in fact ready to join all those who had gone before him. These talks have come back to me many times in recent months.

I have worked in the Nordoff-Robbins approach and with the Nordoff-Robbins principles throughout my whole career. My passion for, and belief in, the healing power of music attracted me to the NR approach and its perspective has helped me understand the use of music as therapy. Having Clive’s presence and teaching at NYU has had a continuing influence on me, our staff and the generations of music therapists whom we have trained. I have developed other ways of working throughout the years but I am always informed by the NR music therapy approach. It has become so much a part of the fabric of who I am and how I work.

Clive had such a beautiful way of saying and writing things about music therapy. I was always moved when he taught even when I had heard the same case or the same principles many times before. These included concepts and phrases—such as the music child, creative communicative musical activity, poised in the creative now, reaching the individuality of each child, and on and on—that represent ways of looking at and speaking about music as therapy that we will always have because of Clive.

The longer music therapists work in this way and experience directly the commitment children bring to bear on discovering or extending musical interactivity…the more evident it becomes that within the music child, and self-actualizing within it, manifests the core self of the individual, the center of personhood, the being child. This recognition lies at the heart of the whole venture and mission of Creative Music Therapy. (Nordoff & Robbins, 2007, p.17)

Clive was such a diverse person. He was an emotional and passionate person never afraid to shed a tear or break into laughter. He was a cultured person, a lover of music, literature and art (in his early years he was a painter and photographer), a story teller and jokester (some even bawdy), and lover of the good life (yes, Clive would have a beer or glass of wine… or two, and his love of various cultures included a taste for the liquors from every country he visited…aquavit, ouzo, etc.). I have been looking at the many pictures I have of Clive dancing at a party or a conference with someone. He spread joy wherever he went–joy for the work and joy for living.

Clive has inspired us and led the way in the field of music therapy…he brought forth a work that so many all over the world have been shaped by. The outpouring of sentiment from all parts of the world upon his death is a testament to what he has meant to us all. He will be missed.

References

Nordoff, P. & Robbins, C. (1965). Music therapy for handicapped children. New York: Rudolf Steiner.

Nordoff P. & Robbins, C. (2007). Creative music therapy. A guide to fostering clinical musicianship (2nd edition, revised). Gilsum, NH: Barcelona.

Robbins, C. (2005). A journey into creative music therapy. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona.

Shah, I.S. (1970). Tales of the dervishes. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.