in turn is what resonates with the human being.
This I believe is one of those unsung secrets, one of those truths that we as musicians all know and yet somehow do not often articulate and it is the reason why this publication is so important. To hear from musician practitioners their experiences of opening up the love, knowledge and intimacy of their first instrument to those they are there to help, is a joy.
For me as a composer, my music must touch an emotional chord, provoke an emotional response, leave an emotional resonance. The essays in this book make a valuable contribution to the understanding of how we invite and make that emotional connection with music. I wholeheartedly recommend that Flute, Accordion or Clarinet? Using the Characteristics of Our Instruments in Music Therapy is disseminated beyond the realm of music therapy and is read by as many musicians as possible.
Sarah Rodgers,
Composer and conductor
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank:
•The children, adults and families who have taken part in music therapy sessions and have agreed to be included in this book.
•The children, adults and families who have contributed to the book through writing, commenting on the work or allowing photographs to be printed.
•The multi-disciplinary teams and the colleagues who have supported the music therapy clinical work.
•The music therapy students who have been on placement with the authors and have provided practical help and inspiration for the writing.
The editors would like to thank:
•The authors, without whom the book could not exist. With over 50 contributors it has been a lengthy process with many prolonged exchanges of emails. Thank you for your patience and endurance. Your excitement and enthusiasm about your instruments shines through and has helped us to keep going.
•Alan Turry for helping us find instrumental music therapists in the USA and Italy, and for consistently providing support, help and humour when it was most needed.
•Alex Street for helping out with the unexpectedly lengthy process of including note ranges for each of the chapters.
•Sarah Rodgers for writing such an original, thought-provoking and moving foreword at very short notice.
•Phyllis Champion for once again coming to our rescue with her insightful, thorough and always thoughtful editing.
Amelia, Jo and Dawn have thoroughly enjoyed working together. The editing process has been much enhanced by Jo’s delicious wine and cheese.
Amelia is grateful to her colleagues at the Croft Child and Family Unit and at Anglia Ruskin University for their support and patience. She would also like to thank her now grown-up children and her husband, David, for their enduring help and love.
Jo would like to thank her parents for their support and encouragement in all her musical endeavours, her children Charlie and Natasha for their patience and understanding, and her husband, Hugh, for being wonderfully supportive.
Dawn would like to thank her husband David for his love and support – and for his patience as she burned the midnight oil.
Dawn, Amelia and Jo would also like to thank David Loombe for his patience, artistic flair and diplomacy in organising all three of us and our instruments to create our cover photograph.
Introduction
Amelia Oldfield
In 1978 and 1979, when I was looking into the possibility of training as a music therapist, I was fortunate enough to observe some clinical work with a music therapist who was a first-study oboist. She was working with a ten-year-old girl with severe learning disabilities and autism. She played her oboe and the girl was transfixed by the beautiful sound of the instrument, following the therapist around the room and showing great interest in the instrument and the player. This was remarkable because the girl was usually very passive, disengaged and oblivious to people around her. I knew then that I wanted to learn to improvise and play the clarinet in this way and share my passion and love for the sound of my instrument with others, using my playing to attempt to engage or help in some way.
In 1979, I applied to do a one-year postgraduate music therapy training course in the UK. At that time there were only two possible places to train in the UK, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Nordoff-Robbins course. When I was lucky enough to be offered places on both courses, I tried to find out as much as I could about them both, but in the end the decision was easy. If I went to the Nordoff-Robbins course, I would be exclusively focusing on the use of the piano, whereas on the Guildhall course I would be able to develop the use of the clarinet in my clinical work, as well as the piano. As an enthusiastic and dedicated clarinettist, the Guildhall had to be the place for me.
During my training I was never actually taught clinical improvisation skills on the clarinet, although I remember classes where I struggled to improve my keyboard improvisation. However, the head of the course, Juliette Alvin, was a professional cellist and often described case studies where she played the cello. On my placements with music therapists who had all been trained by Juliette, I observed two music therapists who played the violin. Students on the course were encouraged to present case material from their placements where they used their first-study instruments. This was enough to give me the confidence to continue using my clarinet in my clinical practice. However, I was surprised by how few of my colleagues at that time continued to regularly use their first-study orchestral instruments in their work.
In 2015, 35 years later, there are now eight music therapy training courses in the UK. All music therapy students remain proficient musicians, but they will be experts on different instruments. The courses vary in their approaches; the majority emphasise keyboard skills, some will teach guitar accompanying techniques and most encourage students to develop the use of their voice. In recent years there has been a greater emphasis on encouraging music therapy students to develop clinical improvisation skills on their first-study instrument, whether this is a violin, a trumpet or a double bass, for example, or a less well-known instrument such as steel pans, the hang or the Chinese erhu. As a result most music therapy students will now continue to play their first-study instrument and use it at least some of the time in their clinical practice.
As a lecturer on the Anglia Ruskin MA music therapy training course in Cambridge, I teach single-line improvisation, encouraging students to discover their own specific strengths and weaknesses when improvising on their single-line instrument, and exploring with them how each different instrument may be used in a wide range of clinical settings. In recent years many students have become quite passionate about using their own instrument in their work and have chosen, in their second year, to write their MA dissertation specifically about the particular use of that instrument in music therapy. Recent MAs have described the use of the accordion (Loombe 2009), the use of the violin (Roe 2011), the use of the harp (Lo 2011), the use of steel pans (Glynn 2011), the use of the erhu (Tsui 2011) and the use of the hang (Fever 2012).
Given that all the music therapy training courses in the UK have for some years now been actively encouraging students to develop their clinical improvisation skills on all the instruments they are proficient at, it is surprising how little literature there is on the use of orchestral instruments in music therapy clinical work. One of the few people who did write about this was Juliette Alvin, who set up the music therapy training course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in
