Here we are. Hello everyone. I'm Paolo Caneva and you're listening to A Light-Hearted Journey Through Music Therapy — a podcast dedicated, of course, to music therapy. Today is Tuesday, April 14th, and in this fifteenth episode — paraphrasing, like many, the title of Gabriel García Márquez's novel — we'll talk about Music Therapy in the Time of Coronavirus.
As you'll have noticed, the title of this episode is not a question. I'm not asking whether or not we can do music therapy today. Rather — briefly — I'd like to sketch a map on which each of you can then choose your own very personal route. I started by simply asking myself: I've been home for 50 days; what have I done, what am I doing, and what can I do in all those contexts that involve me with my music therapy knowledge, skills and attitudes?
In my life "before Coronavirus", doing music therapy meant:
- being a music therapy trainer and teacher (Conservatories, Universities, various Italian training agencies);
- being a populariser of music therapy (studying and reading, writing, publishing on this discipline);
- being a "practising student" on several instruments (the latest being the chromatic accordion);
- working for three care homes;
- taking part, with my Padua colleagues from the Universi Musicali Music Therapy Cooperative, in a Community Music Therapy project — an inclusion path for parents, children and staff aimed at forming a mixed orchestra we named Legature Musicali ("Musical Ties").
Today my situation is as follows:
1. All the "experiential" training sessions have been postponed to October onward. The theoretical lessons, by contrast, after an initial adjustment, have resumed — and, to my great surprise, most students give me positive feedback (savings on travel time, convenience, the optimization of classroom processes that have become "room" processes): positive enough to make me accept, without reservation, that the ideal model for training might be a "blended" one — as my friend Luca X says — dosing "live" experiential moments with online theoretical contexts.
2. This point is certainly the one benefiting most from the current situation: I'm reading, studying and writing as never before, and (forgive me if it sounds disrespectful toward everyone who is suffering or has lost a loved one) it's a state I'll remember for a long time as a kind of "paradise".
3. For this third point (accordion student) I can say exactly the same as for the previous one. I finally have the time to practise and develop repertoire for when we can start working again. I fear a little for my neighbours!!!!!!
4. This is obviously the point most people care about: what happened to the operational, practical side of my doing music therapy with a "clinical" population. As I said, I've been stuck at home since mid-February, and I fear the situation will drag on for a long time yet. In the coming days I'll contact the facilities where I work and propose alternative solutions that I know have been tried by colleagues I've spoken with directly (to name one, I'm thinking of Andrea Pedrotti, who tried a remote online connection with a care home). Here, of course, the discussion becomes specific, because everyone has to reckon with the particular characteristics of the people they worked with before the coronavirus, and with the related methods, techniques and goals. Twenty years ago I coined a title: "music therapy: the art of being suspended"; today I'm still questioning what I believe to be an indispensable attitude for anyone in this job: how flexible are we? how creatively ready are we to adapt to new situations?
5. The fifth point (the orchestral music therapy cooperative project) is nothing short of exciting. Three times a week I meet, via Zoom, with a stellar team of friends and colleagues. It's a fully-fledged laboratory where nine people invent, question and experiment (together or individually) with synchronous and asynchronous strategies, audio and video solutions, tutoring for families, real schedules, real-time directing and a thousand other contraptions… and then we "go on air" for 50 minutes every Tuesday, and afterwards go back to discussing what worked, what flopped, or the surprises that happened… I feel like a little dwarf on a team of giants!
Of course, beyond all these reflections, some clearly critical points remain: network latency, the endless connection problems, the need for at least a minimum of digital literacy among caregivers to use these technologies, the fact that owning a webcam and a computer isn't as obvious for everyone as we might think — nor is an internet connection — the fact that live is another thing entirely, that the relationship is fundamental, and so on, and so on, and so on. The discussion is obviously only at the beginning, and I hope more ideas and reflections will be added, as is in fact happening all over the world.
I'll stop here. As always, in these few minutes I only touch on and introduce topics that deserve other timings and other contexts. We'll hear each other again on Tuesday, April 21st, with an episode where I'll try to share some reflections on "What instruments for those who do music therapy in 2020?"