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, May 12th, and in this nineteenth episode — as the title already suggests — I'll share out loud a few reflections tied to the professional training of those who, one day, "when they grow up", will do this job… I didn't use the expression "when they grow up" by chance, because in recent years we finally see a certain interest from "young people" intent on betting on this "career"… if I think back a few years, I can assure you things weren't quite like that: the proportion of enrolled students was decidedly skewed toward the "forty-somethings".
This wave of youth has prompted a few considerations in me… my usual questions… are the new generations more "cut out" for music therapy? Are the times such that this discipline now offers a little more certainty for the professional future of someone just over twenty? Are today's young people more "daring" than the students of 30 years ago, who instead started studying music therapy "as grown-ups" and already had a job? Have the training programmes changed… the admission tests… the commitment and the costs of the schools?
This detail of the generational difference leads me straight to the title of today's episode. Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe that the driving engine of those who enrolled in the 80s and 90s at the Assisi school (to cite the most "ancient" one)… that the driving engine was predominantly a "cultural" one (with all the exceptions of the case)… When you're past thirty you generally move "with good reason"… you already have a few kilometres on your legs along life's track, and the pace — the timing, to use a more rhythmic word — comes from the weighted average of accelerandos, rallentandos and fermatas.
On the contrary, when you've only just turned twenty, what moves you is something else entirely… there's adrenaline, there's the energy of freshness and of spring, there's a tension toward the "after" so powerful it borders on the prophetic… you feel you belong to the people — no, to the handful — of the "chosen"… no, wait… YOU are the chosen one… at that age… on the outskirts of twenty, you don't even know what the words "ballast", "brake", "rootedness", shrewdness and prudence, calculation and planning, toil, sacrifice, discipline mean… at twenty, all these nouns don't exist… they're pulverized by seven letters: passion. At twenty… you are lightness, you are play and the smile… you are listening and empathy made flesh, you are life itself improvising… and if, in this season, you discover the craft of music therapy, it's love at first sight…
Now I'll stop here, because tomorrow — like yesterday, like today — is a great day: I turn twenty!