Listening to Music in Psychotherapy

Mary Butterton

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315358567
• Print ISBN:
  9781138414815
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Evidence-based change is central to many recent developments in the NHS. This book brings together practical and personal experiences from a wide range of externally evaluated healthcare projects. It demonstrates how to facilitate and promote evidence-based change by drawing on realistic advice on what is, and is not, effective. It enables readers to benefit from lessons learned and provides a comprehensive insight into implementing changes based on research evidence, across broad range of settings in the NHS. 'An important book. It has many exciting insights, enjoy it.' Jenny Simpson in the Foreword 'A unique collection. There are some brave admissions and this is probably the best attempt yet to capture the nitty-gritty of the evidence-into-practice agenda in UK healthcare. I hope you find it a gripping read'. Trisha Greenhalgh in the Foreword

PART 1

Experiencing Music

CHAPTER 1

Conversation with Mercedes Pavlicevic

Mercedes Pavlicevic is a Professor of Music Therapy in South Africa.

I live in Africa where driving is generally a more spacious business than in Europe. My best listening time is when I drive. I have a CD wallet with about 39 CDs, which I update regularly depending on what I have bought recently, or what I haven’t listened to for a long time. On my way to and from work (20-30 minutes each way), this is my private quiet space and my car has a good sound system, so I ‘chill’. My choice depends a lot on my mood - and within seconds I know whether or not I feel like this or that piece of music, and change immediately. When it is the ‘wrong’ music, I can’t bear it, and if unable to change CDs (because I’m driving), then I switch off rather than listen to the wrong music. Listening takes my mind off the traffic and the day (especially after work) and helps me to ‘flow’. Music also makes my car a special place - my space for ME - and whenever someone else gets in the car the first thing I do is switch off the CD player. So I love my car because of this (no I don’t especially like driving - it is more about this delicious privacy, which is a rich time of the day for me). After my yoga class (twice a week) I cannot listen to music at all. I drive in silence.

Home is not an especially good place for listening, mainly because my partner is a musician and we have different musical tastes. Also we’re both sensitive to what is being played and how and I have a feeling that she tends to listen when I’m not at home.

The kind of music I like is - difficult to say - except that it needs to be ‘expressive’, not just chuntering along. I say this because someone recently gave me a CD of the Orchestre de Baobab. They play African genre - wonderful orchestration and good melodies - but somehow it doesn’t work for me; there’s something mechanical about it and I get bored. So I need music that breathes, and enables me to breathe too, in a flowing way. I have a wonderful CD by Inti-Illimani, which is a Chilean group. They play mainly acoustic instruments, and they are BRILLIANT musicians; very sensitive, expressive and utterly delicious. Yo Yo Ma is another artist I love, because of this exquisite ultra-sensitivity and virtuosity. That’s it - it is virtuosity that I love in music. Not a showoff kind of virtuosity, but being utterly accomplished and above that, music so it just plays itself or plays you (as we music therapists like to say). And when I listen to artists like this then the music and I become one; I lose sense of the day, or time or place and become this energy that flows me, in a way, and allows me to allow it to flow me (if that makes sense). I think it has more to do with my body than my mind -1 listen and become it with my entire being, not just my mind. Hence my going on about breathing.

I have a wide range of tastes. In the classics I listen to a lot of Bach; adore Brahms - the colour of his music is magical; and Prokofiev too, and Shostakovich. Then I listen to a lot of African music, Youssou N’dour, Ismael Lo -brilliant Senegalese musicians who sing in a mixture of English, French Arabic, and their own language - and music from the Portuguese African colonies is also wonderful. Then stuff from Sting, Simon and Garfunkel, Abba sometimes. Then there are the Beatles, Eric Clapton, kd lang, some African Gospel is wonderful, Anne Murray, Ella Fitzgerald (gorgeous musician) ... Nusrat Ali Khan ... Much of it music from my teens and twenties.

And I adore opera. When in London I inevitably will go. I like to go alone and become absorbed in it without needing to talk about it - which often interrupts the experience. And music is also linked to my Roman Catholic upbringing. I grew up in Rome, in the time of the Latin rite, and we attended Mass at the Vatican with lots of singing ... and I love the spectacle of music and worship, which is an essential part of my culture even though I don’t practise.

Almost inevitably I have a tune in my head - it seems to go on without necessarily my being aware of it. But if I stop and think I can tell you what it is. (It is a Bach prelude at the minute.)

MB: Mercedes, you write that your choice of music depends on your mood and it seems that music helps your mood and I’m wondering what might be going on here? Could you say a bit more about this? Does music help you check how you are feeling? Or is it something different?

Mercedes: I don’t think that music helps me identify my mood - it’s almost the other way round in that it is often my mood that helps me to choose the music I listen to and I will choose music that reflects my mood, or amplifies it, or that maybe shifts it. So, most of the time, if I am going to listen to music, the music of my choice that’s different from the radio. . .There’s a very quick check as to what I feel like and what’s going on around me. I think you can translate it into what mood I’m in and what musical mood I’m in, in relation to what music I’m going to listen to ... if that makes sense ... (shared laughter). If I feel like remaining in the same mood I will choose one piece of music, but if I feel like having my mood shifted or amplified I may well choose something different.

MB: Yes ... Could you give me an example?

Mercedes: I might think I feel like something Latin American and I put it on and then think ‘Oh no ... that doesn’t feel quite right, doesn’t quite fit somehow.’

MB: Right.

Mercedes: If it fits I won’t think about it, I’ll just know.

MB: Yes ... so it’s almost as if there is a second check ... not a very conscious check when you start but then the second check moves in and you re-arrange your choice, if you like?

Mercedes: Yes, exactly.

MB: Would it be that music is a baseline truth that you tap into?

Mercedes: I think of it as more like a beacon or as a harbour or an anchor. It is something that ... allows safety ... the familiarity of it and the varying distance ... sometimes you can feel very close to a beacon and other times very far away. I have been listening to the Beatles recently. I found a collection. When I was young the Beatles were making the headlines ... I was preteens, so I was aware that this music was going on... and when I listen to it now (and I listen to it as a musician), I think what brilliant music. Listen to what they managed to do. And other times I listen and think ... oh tinny sound ... poor technology ... I can really hear we’re 40 years further on. I think I also listen in different ways so that’s why the baseline of truth doesn’t quite it my truth as a musician, my truth as a person, my truth as an emoting being, my truth as a researcher, etc.

MB: And you need to check all of these when you say ‘truth’?

Mercedes: Yes, absolutely.

MB: When you write that music helps you to flow, can you say something more here? Where is this flow? Can you situate it? Does it belong to the physical body or does it include the psyche. . .?

Mercedes: I think it’s more of a sensate flow. I don’t distinguish between the psyche and my body and the senses ... I think they are absolutely integrated.

MB: Yes.

Mercedes: Mm n ... so that when I think of flow I think of it literally as kinaesthetic.

MB: Movement.

Mercedes: Movement and feeling and touch and pressure and intensity and weight ... all of these things.

MB: It is now generally accepted that as a baby develops in the womb, movement and sound are very much its experience at this early time.

Mercedes: And temperature and warmth.

MB: And Stephen Cross writes that babies are primed for music in the womb. This would also be Trevarthen’s thinking too,wouldn’t it?

Mercedes: Yes, in terms of basic capacity for it. Mm n. . .

MB: But I think that you are saying that all of you is immersed in the experience of music?

Mercedes: I think though there are times when certain kinds of music don’t make sense. And that’s a cognitive thing ... like when I first heard Pierrot Lunaire. It was at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh and it was a brilliant performance, or so people said. I think it was Amsterdam Concertgebouw - Bernard Haitink.

MB: Yes.

Mercedes: And I felt completely outside this music ... I could not make sense of it.

MB: Yes, that’s difficult when that happens isn’t it?

Mercedes: But my musicianship was activated because I was trying to decode it ... make sense of it... and I couldn’t. I wouldn’t say I was repelled by it but I was a bit puzzled. Couldn’t make sense of it at all. I remained outside it.

MB: Yes that’s an interesting thought ... to remain outside of some experience like that.

Mercedes: And it was very curious because it was in a public domain. So it was a live musicking and the audience was enraptured and I thought ‘What is this? I can’t make sense of this music’.

MB: This brings me to the idea of the importance of the individual response to listening to music within therapy and how it should be chosen, if possible, by the patient. I am fascinated that you write that when you listen to music you become it with your entire being. And in Music Therapy in Context you write ‘Music is not about the person - it is the person’. It would seem that a process of identification happens within listening too.

Mercedes: I am thinking about improvisation here, which is a bit different from listening. We usually use the word ‘identification’ in terms of ‘identification with’, don’t we, which implies a separateness between the I and the identified other. So the other remains outside oneself. And I am thinking about improvisation in music therapy because improvisation is a bit different from listening... so it’s almost using music as a vehicle for ... finding various bits of myself.

MB: Yes ... Self-therapy as it is sometimes called.

Mercedes: I think that’s what happens sometimes in improvisation because one is creating and co-creating. It is a mutual process. There is feedback because when I start to play, that impacts on me in a kind of ongoing loop of authenticity with the client. It has to feel really authentic to me and also to the client.

MB: Is it a feeling of authenticity rather than a cognitive thought?

Mercedes: Yes it is a feeling. It is an ongoing process of becoming ... of being becomed, if that’s possible?

MB: Yes.

Mercedes: It is a process of being shaped, being formed. So in a sense when I hear a music therapy recording, and even now when I listen to work I’ve done 20 years ago, I remember with absolute clarity the music and the person. I remember the moment, the music, the person ... I know him!

MB: You know that moment?

Mercedes: I know the moment and I also know the person and I know myself and that person.

MB: Mmn. Yes.

Mercedes: And I think that’s a sensate experience. It’s not just a memory of remembering.

MB: A kind of parallel is when a patient comes into the room talking about a piece of music she has heard that has associations with different important people and events in her life and these associations are tactile, the felt material of a coat or the colour of a dress.

Mercedes: The music was a vehicle for gathering an event that you worked on.

MB: Yes, that’s right ... but I don’t think that this would have worked if I had been outside the music ... I had to be in the music with her.

Mercedes:Ah...

MB: And know ... know from the inside the texture of that feeling, if you like.

Mercedes: So it’s about the music ... always being in a context.

MB: Of course ... of course. That is the title of one of your books.

Mercedes: And there is of course GIM (Guided Imagery and Music). These practitioners are very skilled at using music in particular ways.

MB: But practitioners of GIM actually choose the music, don’t they, which is a bit different from what I’m talking about.

Mercedes: It is, however, an informed choice ... but there is always a question about imposing.

MB: Yes ... but I can understand there may be times when the client or patient is not in a place to make choices at all. You write about ‘becoming the music’, becoming the energy. This sounds more an experience of feeling than of distinct emotions or feelings. What is this deep flowing feeling? Can you say a bit more about it?

Mercedes: I use the word energy and I don’t know if I want to give it another name ... because energy has such multiple meanings. We were discussing the Grand National the other day and the energy of those horses, the power and the momentum, and the sort of gathering in order to leap, and the rise in tension, and the resolution as you land with a thump ... and then you go on. That is an amazing example of momentum and waiting and intensity and phrasing.

And it is not only the movement, it is also what that sort of energy does to the air around it. It’s how it is displaced ... I was watching a video of Ellen MacArthur in that amazing boat ... and how she worked with the energy of the sea and its power. And how this engagement displaces things around it. And when I hear music I hear pure energy ... energy in sound ... I don’t really want to give it any other name. I’ve also just thought of energy in terms of how it collects people. I was in Edinburgh at a traditional folk music festival and it was a very intimate space, maybe 150 people, and a little stage. We were in the front row and three musicians were playing traditional folk music in a very intelligent way ... very fresh ... and it had infinite possibilities for the unexpected. I was very aware of how there were times when I started cranking up the energy of the music and peopl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Experiencing Music
• Part 2: How Do We Understand What We Know?
• Part 3: The Experience of Listening to Music within Psychotherapy
• Glossary
• Index