Today is Tuesday, September 1st.
Well begun is half done.
You all know this saying, don’t you?
I ask because today, in this thirty-fifth episode, we will be talking precisely about beginnings.
Yes, you understood correctly:
how do you begin your music therapy session?
I think we can all agree that imagining a single answer, one that is good for everyone, is a chimera.
The variables that come into play at this stage of the relational process in music therapy are truly numerous.
First of all, I think we can mention the methodological frame of reference: the coordinates that define the boundaries of what each of us means by music therapy, practice, method, but also, more generally, health, care, music, sound, and so on.
All this is usually acquired, more or less consciously, during our period of training and placement.
We inherit it from the teachers we meet, and whom we decide to take as our “masters”.
I would almost be tempted to generalise and say that, for all of us, at least at the beginning of our careers, the opening we decide to adopt will closely resemble the opening we saw being used by the person who introduced us to this profession.
One problem that may arise in relation to this point concerns the organisation of our music therapy schools.
On the one hand, the educational plurality that characterises the Italian training world is undoubtedly a richness.
On the other hand, it can also become — at least for some students — a multiplier of uncertainty.
An excess of models!
Try to think back to your own beginnings.
Who was the teacher who “positively contaminated” you in shaping your practice?
In the musical world — at least the one I experienced during my piano training — the concept of the “maestro” was clear to everyone: the person who accompanies you for a certain number of years and offers you their knowledge, their experience, their interpretative understanding of that composer, that piece, and so on.
When I trained in music therapy, the reference approach, the one that dominated the scene without rivals, was undoubtedly Benenzon’s practice.
Not that it was the only one, of course.
But in the early 1990s, everything that was “not Benenzon” had only just been born, and did not yet have the energy to stand up to “the method”.
In those years, nobody had any doubts about it.
Inside the music therapy room — or rather, inside the music therapy “cabinet” — speaking was strongly discouraged.
The only exception was the “sung word”, which, however, was not necessarily structured in “song form”, as we would later learn from other masters from overseas, and was almost never accompanied or supported by a harmonic instrument.
It was something halfway between a recitative without basso continuo and psalmody.
The rationale for such a practice finds its theoretical support in the idea — still dominant, by the way — that sees music therapy as a “handmaiden”, a sonic-musical substitute for psychotherapy, specifically for psychoanalytic psychotherapy and/or psychoanalysis.
Fortunately — and this is my very personal opinion — things are no longer like this today.
Benenzonian music therapy psychotherapy continues to exist, and alongside it we can choose other practices founded on other models and other visions of the world.
Just to mention one at random:
Community Music Therapy.
I’ll stop here.
We’ll meet again on Tuesday, September 8th, with a new episode of A Light-Hearted Journey Through Music Therapy.