Maybe it's because we're nearly into summer, maybe it's because I clicked one too many times on a pair of trainers, but the fact is that for weeks my phone has been hounding me with one single, hammering question: are you in shape? Are your muscles toned? Ready for the warm season? Squats here, crunches there, planks, lunges, the app that counts your steps and even pays you compliments. Thirty days and you change your life.
And as I scroll through all this motivational bounty, I can't help smiling and thinking one thing: for my musicality, nobody has ever offered me a gym like that.
And yet that's what I live on. I've been doing music therapy for more than thirty years, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that the main instrument in a session isn't the piano I started from, nor even the accordion — the last instrument I learned, the one that today keeps me company in a small town in Brianza, among elderly people and those living with dementia. The instrument is me. My musicality. My hands, the guitar and the percussion I've learned over the years to make work, my voice — the one I fought my hardest battle with, but that's another story — my ear, my ability to stay in time with another person. And an instrument, as we all know, rusts if you don't keep it in shape.
What I'd like to try to tell you today, calmly, is just one thing: the music therapist is first of all a musician. Not just any musician, though. A functional musician.
And here comes my «no». Because someone, reading «musician», will picture the virtuoso straight away. The one who walks into the room and shows off, who plays the hard stuff, who waits for the applause. No. The people we work with are not our audience, they're not there to measure how good we are. If I turn the session into my little concert, I've picked the wrong job — and I say this, let me be clear, having learned it by getting it wrong myself first.
But careful, because the flip side is just as much of a lie. For years in Italy a quiet thought went around, never said out loud: that musical skills, in music therapy, don't really matter all that much. That «the relationship» is enough. And so we covered a more uncomfortable truth with a noble word: sometimes we stayed silent not by choice, but because we didn't know what to play.
The functional musician stands exactly in the middle. Neither the soloist putting on a show, nor the one who goes quiet out of embarrassment. He's someone who cultivates his musicality every day — repertoire, improvisation, voice, ear — and then puts all of it at the service of something else. At the service of the relationship. At the service of a goal I didn't dream up in the shower that morning, but shared with the family, with the team, with the people who know that person better than I do. My musicality isn't there to shine: it's there to work. To tune itself to the person in front of me.
And you know what? I'm not the only one saying it. Right in these months, internationally, several new books on improvisation in music therapy are coming out — and when a theme comes back like that, all at once, it usually means it's touching a nerve.
One I've already marked to read: it's called Improvisation in Music Therapy, signed by Nicky Haire and Becky Lockett for Jessica Kingsley Publishers. And Jessica Kingsley, for us clinicians, is no ordinary publisher: it's something like the mother house of our English books — the one of Bruscia, of Wigram and his historic 2004 manual on improvisation. Not exactly a newcomer, in other words. Haire teaches in Edinburgh, for twenty years she's been a musician, a therapist and a teacher, and she also works with people living with dementia: she and I speak the same language. She puts it like this: improvisation isn't (only) a technique, it's a way of being in the world and of being in relationship. Presence, attunement, making music together.
And then there's one of those that make history: The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Music Therapy, edited by Colin Andrew Lee for Oxford University Press. Lee is someone I admire: a pianist, trained at the Nordoff-Robbins school in London, now a professor in Canada, he spent years alongside people with AIDS and in palliative care, and out of that he drew an idea I carry with me — aesthetic music therapy, where it's the music itself, and not some substitute for it, that sits at the heart of the therapeutic process. And when a house like Oxford devotes one of its Handbooks to improvisation — those choral volumes that don't come out as a fashion, but when a discipline is finally mature enough to stop and take stock of itself — well, that's a sign.
Put in our everyday language: if whole manuals are being written about it, from Edinburgh all the way to Oxford, it means that musicality isn't a frill for vain musicians. It's substance. It's the craft.
That's why, after all these fitness ads, I told myself it was worth taking the upside-down question seriously: what if there were a routine for our musicality too? Half an hour a day, like the one I've always stolen from the piano. Not to become virtuosos. To stay functional. To turn up at the session with hands and head free, ready to be in the here and now of another person without weighing the flow down.
Here's my little gym before summer. No sculpted abs, don't worry. But a few daily exercises for our music child, yes.
That's it from me for today. Got your tracksuit ready?