Groups in Music

Strategies from Music Therapy

Mercedes Pavlicevic

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781846424021
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Music in Groups happens all the time: in the street, the classroom, in music colleges, community centres, hospitals, prisons, churches and concert halls; at raves, weddings, music festivals, public ceremonies, music therapy sessions, group music lessons, concerts and rehearsals.

Some group musicking seems to 'work' (and play) better than others; some sessions feel exhausting even if things are going well; and at other times, we can't begin to explain the complex musical and relational textures of group music work to funders, employers, friends, colleagues, or line managers. In this book, music therapist Mercédès Pavlicevic develops a broad-based discourse to describe, analyse and guide the practice of group musicking, drawing on her own extensive experience. The text is illustrated with vignettes drawn from a range of formal and informal settings that include spontaneous public occasions, collective rituals, special and mainstream education, music therapy, the concert hall, the music appreciation group and community work.

This book makes you think about balancing individual and group needs, the development of group time, dealing with over-enthusiastic performers who 'hog' the group sound, undercurrents in music groups, the complications of dealing with institutions, preparing music listening programmes and buying instruments for group work - if you're involved in any kind of group musicking, this book is for you.

PART I

Planning: Thinking Ahead

This section takes you through seven chapters, each to do with issues that need to be thought through and addressed before you begin your work with groups. ‘Chapter 1: Planning Our Discourses’ clarifies distinctions between professional disciplines and insists on being selective and adventurous in generating discourses that enhance the quality of our work. ‘Chapter 2: Institutions, Idiosyncrasies and the Larger Picture’ considers aspects to do with the work context, be it school, community hall, hospital, village square, church or the concert stage, and its potential to hinder or support group work. ‘Chapter 3: In-groups, Out-groups Norms and Membership’, talks about group membership and explores how we select group members, and describes the implications for your work of open, closed and semi-open groups, as well as long-term, short-term and one-off groups. ‘Chapter 4: Instrumental Thinking and Sound Thoughts’ covers selecting instruments for your music-making sessions, and thinks about linking instruments, and instrumental roles, with players. ‘Chapter 5: On Being Formed by Music’ dips into musical form and structure – whether for listening, performing or improvising – and considers its social impact on your groups. ‘Chapter 6: Considering the Music Space’ considers the nuances of the physical setting for group work, and also considers the group as a physical, social, musical, mental and emotional space. The final chapter in this section (Chapter 7) is about ‘Aims, Tasks, Roles and the Outer Track’ and explores how you describe your work.

There are few direct bibliographical references in this text. Rather, the recommended reading section refers to books that have been helpful in formulating some of these ideas, as well as additional material that you may find interesting.

CHAPTER 1

Planning Our Discourses

Everyone in your group – and that includes you as group leader – is much more than a person who’s ‘come along to have a group musical experience’. Each of us brings our physical, mental and social experience of ourselves in the world; we bring the nuances and flavours of our social culture and identities, our cultural cosmologies, our musical preferences and past musical experiences. We also each bring our propensity for human relationships and for creative engagements with life.

This chapter teases out the complexities to do with talking about groups in music, given the multilayered and multifaceted meanings generated by the act of group musicking. It also clarifies how we might use the distinctive and common aspects of various bodies of knowledge, working contexts and professional disciplines, to help us ‘make sense of’ groups in music.

While too much thinking about group music can distance us from the immediacy of doing, I’d like to suggest that too little thinking risks narrowing the group experience. In some instances, too little thinking can do harm. As you’ll see throughout this book, group musical experience can be exclusive as well as inclusive, alienating as well as bonding, wonderful as well as dreadful. By taking time and trouble to make sense of your own work, your experiences will be that much more exasperating, complex and rich.

1.1 What am I doing here¹?

This question reminds us that when people come together for a group session, they each bring with them aspects of their collective and individual past and present life experience, their social and cultural experience of music, as well as all the layers and complexities of ‘being a person’ in the social world. The group, by definition, offers an experience of self in relation to various other persons, and these experiences of being in relation to other persons are constantly shifting, constantly being revised, and constantly enhancing and interfering with the group’s musical experience. In this sense, any kind of group musicking, whether to do with listening to music, rehearsing, improvising, performing, dancing or learning music, is as much about the persons as it is about the musicking.

Another complexity is that we cannot simply separate the individual person from the group context. Thus, the way I experience myself here, with this collection of persons, is specific to this group and is also formed by it. This way of being includes the entire group in my mind (of which I am also a part), as well as myself as a distinctive person, and member of this collection of persons.

Groups offer a complicated and rich context for persons to engage with one another, and there is something fundamental about the nature of these engagements that is common to all kinds of groups in music: whether folk are standing as a choir, watching you, the conductor, and apparently not directly engaged with one another; or whether they are improvising together, acutely listening and receiving cues from one another as they play. The fundamental nature of these engagements can result in some persons feeling an immediate and powerful bond – or antipathy – to other members of the group. These feelings of antipathy or sympathy, naturally, impact on the group’s musicking, and this, needless to say, impacts on you as group leader. For example, think of times in your own work where the group is apparently ‘singing all the right notes’ and at the end of the rehearsal you are exhausted, uncomfortable – and not sure why. After all, the rehearsal has ‘gone according to plan’. At other times, your class has been disruptive, chaotic, and music seems to have taken a minor role in today’s lesson – and you feel exhilarated and excited by your charges.

There is another complexity in group work generally: the endless tension between individual and group needs, demands and expectations. As group leader you need to be aware of these, and at times hold both in mind at the same time. As well as the multiple, concurrent relationships between group members (which at times need formidable powers of ‘tracking’), various alliances form between certain members of the group, and shift, and reform, often several times during one session. There are distinctive sub-groups within each group and, inevitably, some group members experience themselves as being marginalized by what they feel is the core group. Incidentally, the person who is excluded from the in-group might well be you, and if you’re not alert, you’ll constantly encounter the group’s sabotaging of your intentions, week after week, without knowing what’s going on.

How do we begin to make sense of any of these scenarios (of which there are plenty more throughout this book)?

One way of making sense is to plan meticulously – and be ready to ditch all plans in a micro-second if these suddenly feel inappropriate while we are executing. We then need to think about what we do. Although Part Three of this book focuses on reflecting, here, at the very beginning, we need to think about how we can draw from existing bodies of knowledge to help us ask, and answer, questions like: How does musicking happen in groups? How does musicking impact on my sense of an individual and a group Self? And how do we make sense of group musicking?

First, I want to define the professional territories that inform this book, by focusing on music therapy.

1.2 Professional territories: Having music in common

This book does not pretend that we all do the same thing or think the same way. Each of us belongs to, and identifies with, a professional discipline – whether it is community music, music education, orchestral conducting, choral music, music therapy or whatever.

Also, the physical and social territories and localities in which we work impact on what we do and how we think about it. This raises a slight complication since, increasingly, there is a crossing over of traditional professional territories. What I mean is that community musicians, orchestral and choral musicians, as well as music therapists, might all work in the same contexts. For example, outreach programmes take orchestral musicians into hospitals (generally the territory of music therapists) and community ‘spaces’; while music therapists might work in ‘mainstream education’, which is traditionally the territory of music educators; and music specialist teachers work in contexts to do with ‘health’. In other words, it is not the context that defines what we do and how we do it. Thus, working as a community musician in a medical context does not make me a music therapist any more than working in a church setting makes me a priest. However, the context does have a context-specific discourse, which means that when each one of us (let’s say, for example, a community musician, music teacher and music therapist) talks about our work which happens to be in the same context (say, the context of a special needs school), there are aspects of our thinking and talking that will overlap, and aspects that will be distinctive to our discipline. In other words, the discourse that each of us generates will draw from a common, context-bound discourse that belongs to that special needs school, and will also draw from our distinctive professional discourses of music education, community music and music therapy.

Some of the vignettes in this book reflect this cross-over of work and territories. They describe work in contexts that may be unfamiliar to your own professional discipline, and to your own work. This does not mean that they have no relevance for your work! On the contrary, many vignettes are the focus for describing and speculating about ‘what goes on’ in a way that you can use in your own approaches and working contexts.

Although this book crosses over contexts and contents of practice, locality and approaches, it is not my intention to blur professional boundaries. On the contrary, my premise is that music therapy theory and practice, as a distinctive professional discipline, has something to offer to group musicking in general, and is open to receiving from any of these disciplines. In my opinion, this sharing and receiving does not compromise either music therapy or any other discipline, but rather hopes to enrich them, and be enriched in return.

As you’ve read in the introduction, the core group musicking strategies in this book come from many years’ experience of musicking in and with all kinds of groups; as well as from those aspects of music therapy training, theory, application and reflection that I consider useful for group musicking in general. In other words, there are other music therapy strategies that are not presented here – and even having an excellent grasp of this book will not turn you into a music therapist.

Music therapy training and practice is not only about working with disabled, disordered or diseased groups of people, but working with music in a specific way, with all kinds of people, old and young, highly able and healthy and ordered, as well as with those who are socially marginalized, exiled from their countries, and invisible in social life. Here is a recent definition:

Music therapy provides a framework in which a mutual relationship is set up between client and therapist. The growing relationship enables changes to occur, both in the condition of the client and in the form that the therapy takes… By using music creatively in a clinical setting, the therapist seeks to establish an interaction, a shared musical experience leading to the pursuit of therapeutic goals. These goals are determined by the therapist’s understanding of the client’s pathology and personal needs. (Association of Professional Music Therapists (APMT) definition in Bunt and Hoskyns 2002, p.10)

We might think of music therapy work as being essentially about learning to listen, in a multilayered way, to the person in the music therapy room. Some of this listening is musical, some is personal and interpersonal and, critically, the music therapist listens as closely to what the person ‘does’ as to what they do not ‘do’; to what the person ‘brings’ to the session and what they do not bring. In other words, music therapists give as much value to what is hidden as to what is presented.

At the same time, the music therapist’s quality of listening and being in the music therapy space is a multiple one: as well as being engaged with the client, music therapists are equally engaged with how they themselves experience the client in the moment, and the relationship between them. We can describe this listening and being as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Music, Society and Shifting Music Therapy
• Part I Planning: Thinking Ahead
• Part II Executing: ‘Doing’
• Part III Reflecting: Thinking Back and Forth
• In Conclusion
• Recommended Reading
• Subject Index
• Author Index