This paper explores a Black music therapist’s experience within
As a Black woman working in the greater New York City area, I have participated in
multiple Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) affinity spaces throughout my
clinical training and professional career. The place and placemaking derived from
intentionally centering social identity as a source of experience and meaning-making
have been necessary for my professional development and personal growth. As a former
student of two predominantly white institutions (PWI) and oftentimes predominantly white
interdisciplinary teams, I've come to identify as an "outsider within" (
In this paper, I seek to highlight the importance of social identity affinity spaces for
professional development and personal growth amongst BIPOC creative arts therapists and
investigate the benefits of utilizing an arts-based process in this work. My identity as
a music therapist has contributed to my focus on the two musical pieces that were
developed within the process and shared within the performance of
In the fall of 2018, I received a call for participation in a theatre project and study with the New York University Program in Drama Therapy Theatre & Health Lab. In the initial communication, it was indicated that this project would be directed by drama therapist Britton Williams and would “involve storytelling, improvisation, and collaborating with NYC playwright Daaimah Mubashshir on the development of an original play” (N. Sajnani, personal communication, October 15, 2018). The project aimed to explore experiences of BIPOC clinicians and the performance of race and racism in clinical practice and education.
This project centered the growing understanding of BIPOC clinicians' need for social
identity affinity spaces (
While many people responded to the initial call, twenty people engaged in the
entirety of the process and performance of
The “storytelling, improvisation, and collaborating” mentioned in the initial email became an integral part of the process and was abundantly clear early on (N. Sajnani, personal communication, October 15, 2018). In our initial group meetings, our director, Britton, would lead us in different drama therapy group interventions to support our cohesion and build trust. These interventions included prompts to convey a current feeling state through a sound or movement; passing a sound or movement to another group member, who then transforms it before passing it again; using your body to act out grabbing a “theme” you want to take with you and hold on to; and engaging in improvisation-based activities that allowed us to roleplay various imagined scenarios or reenact lived experiences. Many of our meetings also involved the sharing of our experiences as BPOCs in the classroom and/or the workplace. Group members shared accounts of witnessing racism and experiencing it firsthand; questions around racial identity and the plight of being the “outsider within”; microaggressions and overt aggressions; the burden of explaining; and the longing for a space to be seen, heard, and understood. We were also invited to write down anecdotes, with the intention that the stories would be incorporated into the final script with the support of our playwright, Daaimah. The travel theme specifically grew from an experiential initiated by Britton. During an intervention, Britton called us to imagine our ideal world: a world free of racism, prejudice, and discrimination. We used our bodies and words to play out different scenarios around what this world might look like. Over time, we explored how we might get there, which ultimately led the group to use the ambiguous, transitionary space of a fictional airport to explore these themes. The airport was somewhere in between where we are and where we want to go, perhaps the perfect place to unearth our motives for leaving in the first place.
The audience was as much a part of the performance as the process actors. Before the performance began, the flight guide entered the theatre lobby and assigned audience members seats, first seating people who held the most marginalized identities. This reversal of societal norms called audience members to immediately confront the abnormality of the encounter that would prioritize BIPOC individuals in public spaces. The audience participated in a variation of a privilege line, where the flight guide called them to consider if they had ever been racially profiled at an airport. They met a number of characters along the way, all nameless, sharing stories that highlighted experiences well-known to many BPOC individuals.
The performance storyline centered two travelers who were detained when security
intervened during an altercation with a disgruntled traveler. A support group emerged
in the waiting area, where facilitators and group members alike freely shared their
own painful experiences of racism, as well as their triumphs in developing a greater
sense of self-confidence. Following a dissenter, who didn’t “believe in” or even
think they “needed” therapy, a detained woman sings “Heart Song”—a wailing lament of
unjust circumstance. The flight guide, also the performance’s narrator, ushered the
audience along the journey, until shaken by the experiences of the travelers
prompting him to share his own suffering. Amplifying the common experience of racism,
the travelers moved throughout the airport with racialized “baggage” in tow, a
metaphor for the emotional burden racial trauma brings to everyday life.
While the NYU Drama Therapy Program request for participants was inclusive of all
creative arts therapists, the group was made up predominantly of practicing drama
therapists or drama therapy students, and the structure of the process was influenced
by the clinical expertise of the director, a drama therapist herself. As a Black
music therapist, I felt a hurried, desperate longing to be in a space where I could
hope to be truly seen, heard, and understood within my social location. I was lucky
enough to have engaged in several drama therapy processes prior to joining the “As
Performance Series” and to be a trained Austin Vocal Psychotherapist, a technique
largely influenced by the tenets of psychodrama. Still, I was thrust into a new way
of experiencing myself and my racial identity. The focus on embodiment involved in
this process was new to me, but largely contributed to the long-lasting impact on my
self-understanding. Embodied movement explored in drama therapy interventions
centered my sensorial experience of racism and cellular memory through enactment.
While energizing, it also challenged me greatly. I was not prepared for how moving my
body and acting out racialized scenarios that I and others around me had experienced
would tax me emotionally, unearthing painful feelings that I had learned to keep at
bay, but that still resided within me. As the process crystallized into the
performance of
The use of collective breath became a hallmark of our work together. Collective
breath was initiated in moments where refocus was needed; it was called for at the
end of an emotionally loaded moment of sharing; it was used throughout long rehearsal
days when rejuvenation was warranted. The call to breathe deeply together, often
initiated by our director, served as a grounding technique, bringing us back into our
bodies, the here-and-now, and to each other. At this time, the world had witnessed
and heard Eric Garner’s cry of “I can’t breathe” before he was murdered (
The connection to breath was one of several through lines between music therapy and
drama therapy practice within this process. Connection to breath can support body
awareness and regulation, foster connection and cohesion, and provide an opportunity
for grounding. More specifically, entrainment is a well-established and widely
utilized technique used by many music therapists in a myriad of contexts.
Entrainment, by definition, refers to the “temporal locking process in which one
system’s motion or signal frequency entrains the frequency of another system” (
Britton Williams,
Link to audio:
(Audio from performance on April 11th, 2019, Provincetown Playhouse, New York University, New York, NY)
“Heart Song” (Music and Lyrics by Britton Williams)
Lyrics | Music Therapist Response/Musician | Process Actor |
---|---|---|
The opening interval within the primary musical phrase of this song is a major 3rd. This interval is consonant and stable, and is the hallmark of Brahms’ Lullaby, or “Lullaby and Goodnight.” Britton’s musical choice here might have implied what her purpose for this song was: a musical offering intended to soothe and calm the actors and audience members alike. | With this opening phrase, I tried my best to orient to the current circumstance of the individual’s experience that I was portraying. She is being unjustly detained in the airport but remarks that this is certainly not her first time being scrutinized in this way. | |
The same melodic phrase is repeated here, with new text, continuing in the lulling pattern. | I felt the defeat and fatigue in this story, the result of repeated race-based traumatic experiences. | |
This is the B section, the first time a new melodic pattern is introduced. There’s a shift in the content as well. These lyrics are clear and pointed. | I felt this viscerally, the reality that death could befall a Black person during any degree of conflict with police or other authority figures. | |
This is a return to the initial melody, or the A section. I added some embellishment on “so much” (00:46). I felt that the addition allowed this section to feel more preparatory, as it would lead to what I considered to be the musical climax of the piece. | I have had many experiences when I felt as though people who did not identify as Black not only did not understand me or my experience but didn’t hear me or believe me when I shared it with them. “You have no idea” stuck out to me, the defeat in being unable to describe the feeling of accumulated racial trauma. | |
On “if I scream out” (00:50), I wanted to evoke the feeling or a real scream or a yell. What evolved was a wail, which ties directly to a characteristic musical element of African American Spirituals. | The act of scream-singing these words was oftentimes very emotionally overwhelming. I would often tear up, feeling an intense mixture of pain, anger, and catharsis. |
Within music therapy practice, composition is a widely utilized technique. Gardstrom
& Sorel (
There had been numerous opportunities for verbal processing during group check ins, after an experiential or drama therapy exercise, and even a call to submit a piece of writing that would be incorporated into the script. “Heart Song” was a combination of the stories the participants had shared, many different yet familiar moments felt over several lifetimes. Britton, as the songwriter, took on the role of the “therapist,” interpreting thoughts and feelings that had been expressed by the group, and used her clinical musicianship to create a composition outside of the group meeting. The “therapist” synthesized and clarified the ideas of the group, creating a composition that operated as a unifier of lived experiences.
Britton taught “Heart Song” to me through modeling during a break in rehearsal. She sang it in a way that was repetitive and lilting, containing mostly descending intervals and melodic lines that followed a similar contour. While I was able to learn this song through this version of rote teaching, Britton’s piece was then translated through my own musical reference points. To me, through the lens of my experiences as a singer and musician, this song was evocative, in form and feeling, of African American Spirituals.
A spiritual is defined as an African American folk song that emerged during the
enslavement of African people in the American South. It served as a way to express
the enslaved Africans new Africanized Christian faith, their sorrows and hopes,
and convey hidden messages that would support their escape from slavery (
True to the spiritual form, “Heart Song” was performed a cappella, save for body percussion. While rhythm is traditionally set in the form of clapping or stomping (Library of Congress, n.d.), a heartbeat sound was created by the participants of the performance to create the song’s rhythmic foundation. Depending on the venue of the performance, the way the thumping was generated morphed and changed. It was once a stomping on the group, then a thumping of a fist on the chest, until it transformed to a slapping of the stage itself, rattling the walls of the conference venue. Many music therapists rely on the musical element of rhythm to act as a container for a musical process, as it can create predictability and even promote regulation for the client. The way rhythm was utilized in “Heart Song” certainly created a container—one that was strong enough to hold the painful history that the song ushered into each space where it was sung. Once again, entrainment manifested within this process, as we rhythmically matched one another’s beat, meeting in the emotion of the story and supporting its telling.
“Heart Song,” within the canon of African American spirituals, can be more
specifically, categorized as a “sorrow song,” which is typically characterized as
being “intense, slow, and melancholic” (Library of Congress, n.d.). Famous
examples of sorrow songs include “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” and
“Nobody knows de trouble I’ve seen,” as they contain laments of loss and pain.
W.E.B. Du Bois, a civil rights activist, leader, Pan-Africanist, and scholar,
among many other titles (
THEY that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days—Sorrow Songs—for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo of these weird old songs in which the soul of the black slave spoke to men. Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine. (p. 250)
He goes on to say:
… by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people. (p. 251)
A strong advocate for the preservation of sorrow songs and spirituals as a representation of the past and present experiences of Black people, Du Bois (1903) acknowledged the emotional component of these songs, implying that they emerged from the heart and had the capacity to stir those who heard them. He makes clear though, that this is the music “of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways” (p. 253).
Unvoiced, hidden longing permeates through the text of “Heart Song,” and I
utilized musical elements of African American spirituals to heighten and elevate
the lyrical content. On “if I scream out” (00:50), my exclamation, resembling a
wail or holler, held the painful reality that the song portrayed. It recalled the
ways in which many families are separated and caged at the US border, where Black
immigrants have a greater risk of deportation and have statistically longer
lengths of time in solitary confinement than non-Black immigrants (
And still, despite the suffering they conveyed, these songs were longed to be heard. Du Bois (1903) states that “through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things” (p. 261). Can emotive, musical sharing beget justice? Or at the very least, understanding? In a way, I did feel my character calling for that. A desire to have her story known, with the far-off dream of some kind of reckoning. This experience was a reminder that, as music therapists, it is our obligation to understand the original function of music that presents itself within clinical spaces, as songs carry with them the rich traditions they were born out of. The fact that a sorrow song developed so organically reminds me of the resiliency of Black music, and, as Du Bois implies, the stories that reside in the souls of Black folk, past and present. It also implied an intergenerational knowledge that resided within myself, a historical context for how I experience and participate in music.
“I Hold,” like much of the script, evolved from experiences shared amongst participants throughout the process, and was very much a culmination of the story within the performance itself. “I Hold” initially was intended to function as a spoken poem but was ultimately set to music. Throughout the process, we discussed how music had the capacity to metaphorically “hold” intense emotional sharing. As a result, “I Hold” acted as a clear example of the ways in which music and drama therapy interacted with, supported, and elevated one another within this process. Each participant spoke or sang what they “carried” or “held,” which included a number of inner and outer resources. Participants acknowledged the strength of their ancestors, the pride felt for their lineage, and the joy in the expression of their true selves. In the performance, participants formed a half circle, their backs to the audience, with each participant stepping out and facing the ensemble to deliver their line of the poem. All the while, the ensemble echoed “I hold,” a sort of musical reflection and validation of each offering.
A main melodic theme of the musical phrase “I hold” was a descending major third. It
is worth noting that “Heart Song” featured a main melodic theme that was
characterized by an ascending major third. Steiner (
Link to Audio:
(Audio from performance on April 11th, 2019, Provincetown Playhouse, New York University, New York, NY)
To provide support for the lines of the poem, I established a “holding” pattern on
the guitar, using two chords that alternated. The manner in which musical holding was
utilized here was adapted from Diane Austin’s (
Austin describes the musical elements of her technique:
… this improvisational structure is usually limited to two chords in order to establish a predictable, secure musical and psychological container that will enable the client to relinquish some of the mind's control, sink down into her body and allow her spontaneous self to emerge… The steady, consistent harmonic underpinning, the rhythmic grounding and the therapist’s singing encourage and support the client’s vocalization. Within this strong yet flexible musical container the client can explore new ways of being, experience the freedom of play and creative self-expression and allow feelings and images to emerge (Austin, 1996, 1998, 1999). The client’s voice, feelings, and emerging aspects of the self are all held within this musical matrix. (p.147)
As we explored how best to utilize music in the closing moment, I engaged the group in a musical exploration, offering two holding chords and modeling some vocalizations and short phrases that the group echoed back. Initially, I offered C7 to F7, but the group, including myself, felt as though it was too “Westernized.” This was another interesting moment that reminded me of how each music therapist’s musical reference points can be translated through their clinical musicianship. Was this a byproduct of my own classical music training, which was a requirement for me to be admitted to a music therapy program in the first place? So many music therapy programs are housed within traditional music schools within predominantly white institutions, but I now found myself offering music that did not reflect the needs of the group I was supposedly trained to be able to support through music. I was forced to reckon with my own need to unlearn. The group’s experience of “Westernized” meant “white” and “dominant,” identifiers that have historically hidden and silenced the needs, experiences, and music of the BPOC participants in this process. How could I offer musical holding that featured a harmonic structure more representative of the music cultures within our group? We found our way to Em and Fmaj7, a pattern that the group was able to connect to and rest within. I’m not sure exactly why this chord pattern felt more representative of the group’s experience. Perhaps the combination of a minor and a major 7 chord created a sense of flexibility and ambiguity that allowed the feeling of the piece, via the text, to more clearly emerge.
The initial call for participation in
My position as a music therapist allowed me to further explore music’s capacity for storytelling and conveying difficult emotions within a therapeutic theatre process. It became an example of the role music can play in performance activism and the elevation of stories that have been historically hidden and excluded. It offered the group members and audience a different way of relating to the material shared within this dramatic performance. It was a reminder of the significance of music in my life, and how music therapy concepts might find a function within a drama therapy process. The process of writing this paper allowed me to understand the historical context of how and why the music developed the way that it did, highlighting the intergenerational knowledge housed within Black music traditions.
I experienced a wide range of emotions during this process. As mentioned earlier in
this paper, the new experience of both musical and dramatic embodiment practices
proved to be very emotionally taxing. Movement-based activities that examined such
racially charged material excavated many memories and forced me to confront them.
Despite this challenge, I emerged from this process with a deepened understanding of
myself and those experiences. I was given the opportunity to see my story reflected
in others, and then amplified through dramatization. I experienced connectedness with
the group when I witnessed the stories of others, seeing the nuance in their
journeys, which both converged with and differed from my own. I left the
A case can be made for increased opportunities for participation in social identity
affinity spaces for creative arts therapists who have identities that have been
historically marginalized. The act of placemaking can ameliorate feelings of isolation
and foster a sense of belonging that can impact the clinician’s everyday life. The
flexibility of placemaking allows the community to prioritize its needs, as seen within
It is my sincere hope that the impact of
My identity as the “outsider within” brought me to this group, but my participation in
it allowed me to see what Collins hoped Black women in that position would uncover: an
opportunity to create a unique space for myself and to lean upon my community and the
strength I garnered from it to continue making space for myself and others like me. As
my castmate Mary Morris would often say, “ubuntu,” a Zulu phrase meaning, “I am because
you are,” or, “a person is a person through other people” (
Britton Williams, director and principal investigator of
Jasmine Edwards is a music therapist working within a pediatric hospital in New York City. Jasmine has a bachelor’s degree in music therapy from Florida State University, and her master’s degree in music therapy from New York University. She has experience working in private practice, outpatient, school-based, and medical settings, and is trained in NICU-MT, First Sounds: Rhythm, Breath, Lullaby, and Austin Vocal Psychotherapy. Jasmine has a vested interest in bringing discussions of power, privilege, and oppression into music therapy training and education. She also serves as an adjunct faculty member at Howard University, New York University, and Nazareth College. Jasmine identifies as a Black woman.