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 21st, and in this sixteenth episode I ask myself what instruments are available to those who do music therapy today.
A first clarification, of course, has to be made about what we mean by "instruments". What are we talking about? We're talking about techniques, knowledge and skills, sound devices, assessment tools, and so on. Another level to disambiguate is the one implicitly contained in the word "today": are we referring to this specific pandemic period, or more generally to those who do music therapy fifty years after the arrival of this discipline in our country (the first conference dates back to 1973)? To make the context clear, I'll say right away that in today's episode I'm referring to which devices are available to those trying to do our job during this lockdown.
It goes without saying that, given the duty to respect the government's safety rules, the only way to try to work (where possible) with music therapy is "remotely", at a distance — and therefore through means and devices that are necessarily "digital", electronic, telematic. If you browse around a little, you'll discover that, besides being the rediscovered, praised and simultaneously hated vector par excellence, these days the web is also the container of the most heated solutions and discussions.
Tutorials, webinars, lessons, videos, web radios, podcasts and blogs multiply on how best to produce, manage and share lessons, therapies, support, psychotherapies, leisure activities and so on — and, at the same time, again on the internet, we read the exact opposite of all of it: that to learn you need human contact; that webinars are just a crude commercial operation; that lessons are first of all a chance for the student to be near the Master, and if that closeness isn't guaranteed they're mere palliatives; that transmitting knowledge through a video doesn't really touch the student's "knowing". But the sentence that bounces around and multiplies endlessly, above all the others, is: "Music therapy is something else……" "What you can do with Zoom may well be lovely, but let's not call it music therapy." "Music therapy is first and foremost a relational event, so please don't drag it into these strange… virtual… things…" "Letting patients listen to music through headphones in a Covid-19 ICU is not music therapy." …to cite only the most frequent ones.
What do I think… I think that every time, in my speaking, I describe something "by negation", I'm either attacking or defending myself (which, in the end, amount to the same unease: fear). In my very small experience, the most "elegant" definitions are the ones that tend to integrate, to include "senses", to comprehend… especially when we're trying to define something that carries within itself an "artistic matrix".
In these days of forced stillness, how afraid are we of disappearing? How afraid are we of discovering that perhaps we never appeared at all? If, instead of a nurse (or a doctor — it doesn't matter), it had been a big name in music therapy (but do big names really exist, or are they just urban legends?) who bought the mp3 players for the Sant'Orsola hospital in Bologna — that gesture (which, by the way, in that specific context is probably the fastest, the cheapest, the only feasible one) — would it, I wonder, have triggered the comments you can read in the social groups of people who do music therapy?
Isn't it that what makes us so angry — more than the technique itself, or the sensationalist newspaper headlines — is the realisation that, while we're at home, out of work, what we could have done (or claim the exclusive right to manage) was put into practice by someone else? Isn't it that, since we couldn't do it ourselves, we'd rather declare that that stuff isn't music therapy?
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 28th, with an episode where I'll try to share some reflections on the theme "Acoustic or digital? Technology in music therapy."