I'm a Music Therapist

The sea captain’s voice sang the opening note of the Spongebob Squarepants theme song over a speaker:

“Oooooohhh!... —” and then silence as the music cut out for the third time in row. The group groaned in unison with frustration that they were only hearing the first few seconds of a song they knew and loved. About a dozen of us were sitting in an ring, some on chairs, others on couches: me, two students, two staff members, and about 10 adults with traumatic brain injury. One of the students was leading a “Name That Tune” intervention to work on long-term memory recall. Unfortunately, the wifi wasn’t cooperating.

My student read the room. Clearly, everyone knew the song and was itching to sing along, but by a technology glitch was interfering with our musicking. And then, by instinct, my student starting the song again in a mock-sailor’s accent and the group fell right into chorus:

“Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?” “Spongebob Squarepants!”

“Absorbent and yellow and porous as he?” “Spongebob Squarepants!”

“Who’s nautical nonsense be something you wish?” “Spongebob Squarepants!”

“So drop on the deck and flop like a fish!” “Spongebob Squarepants!”

“Ready?”

“Spongebob Squarepants,

Spongebob Squarepants,

Spongebob Squarepants,

Spongebob, Squarepaaaaants!”

The whole group erupted in laughter at their enthusiastic singing about a cartoon that no one had watched in years, but we all still remembered the words to a tee. And the repetitiveness of the response section ensured that everyone participated after the first or second line, even if they weren’t familiar with the show. Afterward, the conversation had a great buzz. A few people shared about their favorite character or memories of watching the show in high school, exactly practicing the goal that my student originally had in mind.

This spontaneous moment clearly hadn’t been devised ahead of time. As a music therapy supervisor, I’m a stickler for my students’ weekly session plans. Have they written out step-by-step task analysis? Have they planned out their transitions into and out of the activity? Did they think through exactly what materials they’ll need? But while there’s definitely a role for strategic planning in music therapy, it’s even harder to teach the instincts and responsive decision-making my student displayed in that moment: being able to facilitate a session when the session doesn’t go according to plan. They had turned a hiccup into something better than they could have planned for.

These “happy accidents” as I refer to them in my head can at first feel intimidating, especially for students and new clinicians. You’re afloat from a session plan that’s supposed to lead to predictable success for your clients in working toward their clinical goal. The landscape of what’s about to happen next is dimmer and you have to prepare to respond to a wider array of potential responses from the client (for better or worse). But going “off script” (or even walking into a session without an explicit plan) does not mean that you as a clinician do not maintain control. Instead, you’re improvising and shaping the session in real-time to where the client is and where they want to go.

Developmentally, I’m just starting to  be able to trust my ability to make the most of these happy accidents. Temperamentally, I’m much more of a planner. But with six plus years of experience, I’ve started to recognize a pattern of tepid client responses when I stay too close to my script, which doesn’t serve my purpose as a clinician. If I’m not flexible, if I’m not open to reading and following my client’s mood or preferences, then I’m not being an effective leader. Instead, my session plan can become rigid and occasionally overbearing.

With this theme in mind, below are some tips for becoming a more flexible and responsive music therapist.

Read your client’s behavior as communication. Your clients will tell you through their body language whether they’re getting what they need from your session. It doesn’t feel great to see averted eyes or distracted body postures when you’re leading an activity, but it’s good information to know that you’re not connecting with the group on some level. You may want to change up the activity, verbally check in with their energy levels, or even ask they directly how you can refocus the session on a music therapy activity that fits where they are in that moment.

Practice leading lots of types of interventions. When you do have to go “off session plan,” you need to have a well-stocked clinical toolbox to pull from. All music therapists come from a certain musical background that makes us comfortable with certain types of music and ways of interacting with music. Maybe you played in a garage band in high school and you love songwriting or you started off as musical theatre major who loves leading with your voice. With this awareness, make sure to practice musical skills to fill that clinical gap. (For me, it’s original songwriting and rap.) But if you aren’t comfortable with leading certain types of music interventions, you won’t be able to solidly lead that type of intervention on the fly when needed.

And finally, know that these insights and awareness took me years to get to as a music therapist. With my growth and my newer supervisor role though, I’m learning to appreciate and even seek out “unexplored territory” within my sessions. When something goes wrong, my instinct is not to get the session back on track with the original session plan as soon as possible, but to embrace and maximize the moment however that best serves my clients.