All the names I’m mentioning in this speech, have been changed by myself. This is for the privacy of the persons and their families, I’m working with.
I will speak to you about music-therapy and especially about “rhythm” and rhythmic happenings in music-therapy.
First of all, I will present myself:
I’m German but now have been living in Italy for 20 years. I’m working in Milan as a music-therapist and sometimes also as a social worker. Music has always been the most important “value” in my life. When I was a child I learned to play the flute and I always have sung in choirs since I was 6. Then I wanted to learn to play the saxophone, so a saxophone was what I asked for to my parents as a gift for my 16th birthday. But a friend of my family, an opera-singer, once heard me singing and told my parents they should push me to train singing because he found I had a very good voice. So my parents gave me the possibility to be trained as a singer instead of the saxophone. At the first moment I was a bit disappointed, but then I began to train my voice and felt in love with singing. I wouldn’t stop to sing for the rest of my life and for a long time I was trained in singing by different teachers, in Germany and in Italy. Once I tried to go for a career as a singer, I got in touch with the absurd reality of competition between artists, even if you are not yet a professional performer. I totally disliked this part of the dream to become a singer!
Music should not divide people but unite them. This is, why I didn’t go for a career as a musician, but as music therapist: I want to share my passion for music with other persons and so I found the most beautiful job of the world (for me).
I’m working as music-therapist mainly with autistic adults and adults with mental and physical disabilities. I also work with autistic children in a primary school and since a few months I’ve been working in prison with male prisoners who have a psychiatric diagnosis, most of them have problems with drug-addiction.
Last but not least I’m also active member of Arci Varieazioni, the cultural association, partner of the Drums for peace-network. My job in Arci Varieazioni is to coordinate the partnership with Drums for peace.
So now I presented myself and should begin to speak about rhythm and music-therapy. Usually, when people ask me “what is music-therapy?” my very first answer is another question: “what is music?”, just to start the dialogue… but now we might not have the time for this, as we are here to discover the rhythm. And so, what is rhythm?
We will also talk about that, but I don’t think we will have The answer, we will have a lot of ideas and other questions.
I will now show you the first 11 minutes of a documentary movie about Evelyn Glennie. She is a famous drummer, coming from Scotland and performing all over the world. I think this movie could help us in researching about the question “what is rhythm”.
------film-----
Ok, now we saw this short part of the film “Touch the sound”. I like very much the visualization of rhythm and hope you liked it as well. Evelyn Glennie is deaf. She doesn’t like to be defined as a miracle: a deaf musician. But, journalists are very attracted from this. When they interview Evelyn, she often says, “if you want to speak about deafness, please speak with a doctor, if you want to speak about music, you can speak with me”
Let us please think a moment about this: Evelyn is a musician, a drummer and she’s deaf. When she was a child she wasn’t deaf and played the piano. When she was about 9 years old, deafness came into her life and her doctor told her, “You won’t ever be a musician, you’re loosing the capability to hear and you must find another passion, but this cannot be music”.
Evelyn didn’t accept this, but she decided to change the instrument: from the piano to the drums. Now she’s a very famous drummer and percussionist.
This is important for our decision to work about rhythm: Evelyn Glennie has a deficit: her ears don’t work like ours do. Her disease would be called a sensorial disability. But she’s not excluded out off social life, she’s working in a job she loves and this is not the first job you could imagine for a deaf person.
When a person is not yet born, she’s already a hearing being: She can hear her mother’s heartbeat and mother’s and father’s voices. She can hear the moving of amniotic fluid. These are rhythms and it is something what we have in common all of us. Even persons who cannot hear in the conventional way, can anyway be active musicians, thanks to the vibrations and thanks to rhythm.
Mothers all over the world take their new-born children with the head at their left. This is where the baby can better hear his mother’s heartbeat.
Our every-day life has a rhythm: we sleep and we are awake, organizing this with a rhythmic precision and we can get very nervous, if chaos disturbs our need of rhythm.
Women’s menstruations are rhythmic, seasons are, day and night are a rhythm, rhythm is life. And life is rhythm. What is musictherapy? And what’s the link to rhythm?
There are a lot of definitions of music therapy. And a lot of theories and thoughts. In Europe we can find so many different schools and methods of music therapy. There are a lot of differences between North and South-Europe. I’m German, but I was trained in Italy and so I belong to the Southern school of mt.
So, whatever I can tell you about music therapy it won’t be neutral.
Music therapy is a non-verbal psychotherapy. Music, sounds, rhythms, are used for building up a relationship between the so called patient/s and the music therapist. It should be a therapeutic relationship: the therapist aims her actions focussing on non-verbal communication, if possible. Whatever the music-therapist does, communication is the most important aim.
Working with mental disabled persons, I can say that very often verbal communication doesn’t work: We need to learn to deal with “their” kind of communication. Music is a very good tool in this adventure!
I would like to present to you Salvatore. He’s about 45. Salvatore cannot speak but can understand some sentences and can answer to these, using signs.
Salvatore has also a physical disability: he cannot walk with harmony: one leg is slower than the other one. So, walking, S. drags one leg and always makes a very typical sound. Salvatore doesn’t speak. He makes a lot of vocal sounds. He’s not able to control his own spittle. So it is not that easy to be in touch with Salvatore, because he spits continuously and it’s easy to feel disgusted. Salvatore is able to recognize persons and when he likes a person, he wants to touch and to kiss. Kissing was the way, he tried to communicate with me. I couldn’t make it to accept his wet kisses and found a way to make him understand that I don’t like his kisses and he understood. I worked a lot with him about his rhythmic being, dancing together. Salvatore makes a lot of vocal sounds. These sounds seam like from an animal. But if you are very careful, listening, you can hear him humming in a certain rhythm.
I’m able to hum together with Salvatore, now. It is a very beautiful experience. We found out together how to share our rhythms. It was very important, that I could make him understand, I don’t like to be kissed. This means, I could keep my personal intimacy, but also his intimacy and I didn’t accept a thing, only because he’s disabled.
I also want to present to you Mario, a young man. I have been working with him for almost 8 years. Mario is 24 years old and he’s mentally retarded and also has a diagnosis of autism. Mario is able to speak,and he speaks continuosly, even if he doesn’t talk a lot speaking. He usually repeats the same sentence even 50 times, laughing and shouting. For instance he says, “Now it’s too early to go home. Now ist time for music. At 4 I will go home and daddy is waiting for me at home.” So, I answer, “Yes, that’s right, Mario, at 4 you go home but now it’s 3 which is the moment for your music-session. “Yes, it’s 3, time for music, I will go home at 4. Now it’s too early, HAHAHA, Iw ill go home at 4, now it’s too early, hahaha, daddy is waiting for me at 4. Now it’s 3 and it’s time for music. …..” and so on and so on. So at the beginning I didn’t know what to do, but today I answer once to his sentence and then I begin to consider only the non-verbal part of Marios speaking, capturing rhythm and melody of it and improvising about this. For example I play the drum and make a rap, like “Oh yes, oh yes, it’s too early to go home. But at 4, but a 4, you will go home.” Mario usually appreciate this and begins to play the drum as well, but doesn’t stop speaking. So, the dialogue has begun and sometimes dialogues between me and Mario seam free jazz. And anyway the communication is much richer, listening to the music in Mario’s speech, than if we listen only to the words.
In music-therapy we use a lot of percussion instruments, also because they are easier accessible than for example a flute (you can immediately produce sounds, and rhythms, without any frustration).
Listening to a patient like Mario, I try to enter in his rhythm and play with him, maybe then, changing it a little bit, so my answer is not a mirror but a small variation and then he can capture this variation and our repertoire of communication becomes richer. We call this process syntonic communication.