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Mark Tag

As my music therapy internship is coming to an end I have been establishing closure with more and more of my clients. Many families of clients have expressed gratitude, appreciation, and even sadness to see me go. I hadn’t actually realized how much of a partnership I had established with some of these families, which is a large part of the therapist/client relationship.

That’s something we weren’t exactly taught in music school. They teach us how to work effectively with many different populations, but they don’t teach us very much about interacting and connecting with the families of clients. In early childhood education, when a teacher establishes relationships and partnerships with families, the child’s learning is enhanced. This goes the same for music therapy. When there is a strong connection between the family and therapist, the child’s experience is enhanced, and this internship has certainly taught me that.

Well, it’s been a wild ride. I’ve learned many things about music therapy and life in general. I’ve experienced many things, a lot of which I never thought I would experience. And I can now say with certainty: I am ready for the professional world. Here I come!

Blog Topic – Job Market

                This is probably the most perfect week I could have gotten “job market” as a blog post, as I will be finishing up my internship work and moving on to the professional job market in less than a month now! Right now, the professional world of music therapy just seems to fill me with a mix of excitement and anxiety; excitement because I’m about to start what is going to be my life-long career and it can go literally any direction from here, anxiety because I still feel like an intern a lot of the time.

                From this internship, there is an array of different career options in front of me. Music therapists can make a living being self-employed, being in private practice, contractors, or working in a music therapy clinic/studio. Until recently, being self-employed was something that I didn’t think I could ever do. However, surveys have shown that about 81% of music therapists are considered self-employed, so it’s looking more and more like owning my own practice will be a necessary step in my life-long career.

                Where my life as a music therapist will go, nobody knows. The journey down this path, as I’m sure any professional music therapist would explain, is a crazy and unpredictable one. It’s going to be a crazy transition, but after 4 years of schooling and 6 months of interning, I feel as though I’m ready to take on the professional world. Here I come!

Mark

Client – a person or organization using the services of a professional person or company

I’m very glad that I got this word for my blog entry. I find that a big part of the purpose of these blog entries is to look at a word, usually a musical word, and see how it relates or apply to my work as a music therapy intern. Well, it doesn’t get more applicable than the word “clients” because that is exactly what I’m in this job for. There are many parts that I love about this internship. I love being able to say that I get to play drums and guitar with kids, teenagers, and elderly people for my job, but there is so much more to it than that. I am in music therapy for many different reasons, but to help improve the lives of my clients, above all. This job has a lot of pleasant parts as well as difficult parts, and that is one thing that I can say keeps me going through a lot of the stresses and challenges of this position; knowing that at the end of the day, I am doing this to help improve the quality of someone’s life.

Mark

Collaborate – To work jointly on an activity, to produce or create something

As a musician, all I seem to do is collaborate. I have constantly been collaborating with other musicians and artists ever since I picked up the tuba. I’ve collaborated with single musicians by playing duets, or being accompanied by a pianist, and I’ve also collaborated with upwards of 400 different musicians, dancers and other artists on the field in a football stadium. A career as a musician has seldom led me to working alone.  The same thing can be said about my experience so far as a music therapy intern. I’m constantly collaborating.

Since I started this internship, collaboration has sort of taken on a new meaning. Not only is it collaboration with other musicians, but with other therapists as well. Working with clients is often very much a collaborative effort between other music therapists, schools, speech therapists, occupational therapists, and ABA therapists. We are always in constant contact with many of these other professionals to share what sort of goal areas we are working on with different clients, and our ideas of how to best work with the clients. This collaborative effort helps us to be sure that we are all helping the clients progress in the areas that they need most.  

-Mark

Listening – To concentrate on hearing something

Listening is a term I learned to become very familiar with while studying for my music degree in my undergrad. Up to this point, I had thought of listening as being a very simple action; you’re either or you’re not. I did not think of listening as being a skill that can be worked on, practiced, and developed to a higher level, like many other aspects of music performance. It was a wild experience to see how much more some of my peers could get out of listening to someone play Ride of the Valkyries on tuba than I could. These classmates could pick out and analyze parts of the music that I didn’t even know were happening, because listening was a skill they have been practicing and developing for years already.

Ever since then, my entire approach to active music listening changed a great deal.  I’m always trying to find different things to listen to in familiar music that I might not have noticed before, such as vocal harmonies, time changes, musical nuances, etc. In time, the skill started to get easier. By practicing active listening with music, I noticed that many aspects of my musicality improved. My sense of rhythm and pitch got better and singing harmonies got so much easier. Many of these listening skills carried over to other parts of my life, the biggest one being the social skills and communication. For most of my life, hearing non-verbal inflections in the voice was not easy for me, and that’s such a big part of expressive communication. Now, however, hearing and understanding these non-verbal cues has become very natural for me, which has helped immensely in my music therapy internship. The skill of actively listening and picking out both verbal and nonverbal forms of communication has been essential while working with clients in music therapy. It helps to understand what kind of emotions a client might be feeling when they cannot verbally tell you. It also helps greatly while helping a client write song lyrics about something that has happened in their life. By practicing active listening, I was able to work on a lot of these skills and apply them to my practice as a music therapist.

The sense of hearing is the sense that we, as music therapists, connect with the most. It’s the medium by which we intervene and improve our client’s lives. We’re always hearing. We never stop hearing. In fact, the very last sense to go during death is the sense of hearing. However, hearing and listening are two different activities. Listening takes attention, practice, and development. Developing the skill of listening has helped to improve many aspects of my life, and the people I work with.

Mark

Crescendo:  A gradual increase in loudness and intensity

In music, a crescendo is tool to add a level of excitement or suspense to a part of a song. They are often used to engage, excite, and elicit certain emotions from the listener.  A crescendo can be abrupt and startling, or it can be more gradual to build anticipation. When a piece of music crescendos to a high point, it is almost always followed by a decrease in sound and intensity. Many pieces of music can leave you with a calm feeling after the peak of a large crescendo. Like many other elements of music, a crescendo can be used as a great metaphor for many different aspects my life and experience being an intern with MTCCA.

My life is full of crescendos, of all different shapes and sizes. My days can often be one giant crescendo. From the moment I wake up the day gradually builds with intensity and excitement. My days are also filled with short bursts of intensity that can be startling or stressful. Similarly to a crescendo in music, the crescendos in my life are also followed by a decrease in excitement, leading to a calmer and mellower feel. My work as a music therapy intern has contributed a great deal to these crescendos, filling my days with constant excitement, stress, and anticipation.  Life is a constant crescendo and diminuendo.

Mark

Cadence – Balanced, rhythmic flow, as of poetry or oratory.

When first thinking of what I was going to write about when I got the blog topic “cadence,” I realized that, though I’ve heard the word many times before, I wasn’t exactly sure how to define the word. As musicians, the first thing that tends to pop into our minds is a IV-V-I progression, or perhaps a marching band cadence. When I hear the word, I can still imagine my high school’s marching band playing a cadence while marching in a parade. A cadence, however, can also be something out of language and poetry. A cadence in language is usually a change of inflection of the voice to show the end of a sentence or stanza in poetry. Whether it is a cadence you see in a piece of music, poetry, or literature, a cadence is always something that is used to create structure, rhythm, balance, and flow.

Since beginning my internship with MTCCA, a cadence has taken on a somewhat new meaning for me. Though it’s still a tool to create structure and flow, we also use it in a much different, more personal way. Every person has their own personal cadence, or a natural pace in which that person moves and interacts with their environment. Even though cadences are constantly changing with a person’s mood or health, they can still be measured and used to provide an extra sense of stability or comfort. Adapting music to match a client’s specific mood and pace can make a world of difference for a client’s attention and sensory regulation. It’s one of the many therapeutic tools I have learned to utilize so far in this internship.

A cadence is something that exists in music, literature, poetry, art, and even ourselves. It can used to create structure, rhythm, and flow in our music and literature, but it can also be used to create stability and flow in someone’s life.

Mark

Resilience: as a character trait, is a person’s ability to recover after facing stress, adversity, or illness.

The word “Resilience” is a particularly applicable word for me right now. After my first three weeks of interning with the MTCCA, I can safely say that it is a characteristic that I am going to need in the profession of music therapy. It is a characteristic that is displayed in music therapy constantly, not only by us as therapists, but by our clients as well. We can see it in a therapist’s ability to always think of the client first, even while going through their own personal troubles. You can also see resilience in the clients, and their ability to keep trying and trying, even when faced with a very difficult task. The start of this internship in general has been a serious test of resilience for me because if the enormous amount of change it brought to my life. Even though I had to leave a large part of my life behind, the excitement of discovering new things and places has kept me very resilient.

Resilience is something that a music therapist incorporates into many aspects of their work; everything from leading several large groups in a row throughout the day, to cleaning up the session room before the next session. After some sessions, I’ve seen the room look like it had been hit by storm of instruments and toys and still be put back together before the start of the next session. If that’s not a display of resilience, then I’m not sure what is.  To me, resilience is the ability to look past all of the stress, difficulty and bruises, and continue to love what you do, and the people you do it for.

Best,

Mark McKenna