Groups in Music: Strategies from Music Therapy

Groups in Music

of related interest

Music Therapy – Intimate Notes Mercédès Pavlicevic ISBN 1 85302 692 1

Music Therapy in Context

Music, Meaning and Relationship

Mercédès Pavlicevic

ISBN 1 85302 434 1

Beginning Research in the Arts Therapies A Practical Guide

Gary Ansdell and Mercédès Pavlicevic ISBN 1 85302 885 1

Music, Music Therapy and Trauma International Perspectives

Edited by Julie P. Sutton ISBN 1 84310 027 4

A Comprehensive Guide to Music Therapy

Theory, Clinical Practice, Research and Training

Tony Wigram, Inge Nygaard Pedersen and Lars Ole Bonde ISBN 1 84310 083 5

Groups in Music Strategies from Music Therapy Mercédès Pavlicevic

Jessica Kingsley Publishers London and New York

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, England W1P 9HE. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher. Warning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution. The right of Mercédès Pavlicevic to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in the United Kingdom in 2003 by Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd 116 Pentonville Road London N1 9JB, England and 29 West 35th Street, 10th fl. New York, NY 10001–2299, USA Copyright © Mercédès Pavlicevic 2003 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 1 84310 081 9 Printed and Bound in Great Britain by Athenæum Press, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear

In memory of Charlotte, whose long painful dying accompanied this text’s emergence into the world, and for Tania, whose generosity of soul allowed me time for each.

Contents List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Music, Society and Shifting Music Therapy

11 11 12 13

Part I Planning: Thinking Ahead

21

Where does this book come from? Who should use this book? How does this book work (and play)?

1.

Planning Our Discourses

2.

Institutions, Idiosyncrasies and the Larger Picture

32

3.

In-groups, Out-groups, Norms and Membership

40

1.1 What am I doing here? 1.2 Professional territories: Having music in common 1.3 Improvising our meanings 1.4 How considered is your discourse? 1.5 Re-meaning comfort zones 2.1 Institutions as systems – with a bit of help from Systems Theory 2.2 The first approach: Overt and covert mission, vision and values 2.3 Staff, hierarchies and power 2.4 Getting trapped 2.5 Summing up 3.1 Why spend so much time on this kind of planning? 3.2 In-groups and out-groups 3.3 Group members hip: Being selective about selections? 3.4 Group process: A brief introduction 3.5 What kind of group? (How long, how short?) 3.5a The one-off group 3.5b The short-term group 3.5c The long-term group 3.6 Setting norms 3.7 Closed, open and semi-open groups 3.7a The closed group 3.7b The open group 3.7c The semi-open group 3.8 Re-grouping

23

4.

Instrumental Thinking and Sound Thoughts

56

5.

On Being Formed by Music

66

6.

Considering the Music Space

79

7.

Aims, Tasks, Roles and the Outer Track

87

4.1 Sound advice 4.2 Instrumental range and sound thinking 4.3 Making links: People and instruments 4.4 Making instruments 4.5 Personal property 4.6 Concluding notes

5.1Music and society 5.2 Working and playing cycles 5.3 Owning the music 5.4 Music and you! 5.5 How predictable? How spontaneous? How structured? 5.6 Musical structure (and group systems?) 5.7 Making links 6.1 The pre-music space 6.2 Tuning in to spaces 6.3 How vital is the music space? 6.4 Limits of time, place and person 6.5 Final thoughts 7.1 Roles 7.2 Your tasks Divertimento: The inner track 7.3 Group aims and briefs: Generally speaking 7.4 External aims and briefs 7.5 The inner track 7.6 How clear are your aims? (and revisiting discourses) 7.7 To conclude: Keep track

Part II Executing: ‘Doing’ 8.

Forming Groups and Groups Forming: Quick time, music time and sound deeds 8.1 On becoming a group 8.2 In the mood – musical thinking 8.3 On ‘receiving’ the persons 8.4 Split-second musicking 8.5 Wrapping up

9.

Group Flow, Group Pulse – Finding the Groove 9.1 Grouping asynchronies or falling apart? 9.2 Learning from not-flowing 9.3 Unflowing roles 9.4 Concluding thoughts

101 103

115

10. Whose Group? Whose Music? (and Whose Expectations?)

125

11. Group Rituals

138

12. Live Meanings – Listening to Music

146

13. Team Building and Conflict Resolution

161

Part III Reflecting: Thinking Back and Forth

173

10.1 The cohesive group(s)? 10.2 Whose session is this? 10.3 The split focus 10.4 The hidden group – outside 10.5 The volunteer group 10.6 Whose music? 10.7 The concert performance 10.8 Concluding rites

11.1 Social rituals and group music 11.2 Emerging rituals in group music 11.3 Developing a ritual 11.4 Imposing rituals (at your own risk…) 11.5 Concluding rites 12.1 Music and social context 12.2 Whose music? (And whose meaning?) 12.2a Prescribed meaning 12.2b Episodic meaning 12.2c Grammatical meaning 12.2d Direct meaning 12.2e Iconic and symbolic meaning 12.2f Episodic meaning and associations for listeners 12.3 Divertimento: A listening exercise 12.4 Musical choices for social rites 12.5 Closing notes 13.1 What kind of flops? 13.2 In- and out-groups 13.3 Sticking to the plan 13.4 Who’s in charge? 13.5 Who’s running this show? 13.6 Think before the group flops 13.7 Whose conflict is this? 13.8 Building bridges

14. How Formed is Your Listening? (and How Informed is Your Speaking?)

14.1 Making sense of music: Listening to ‘Greensleeves’ 14.2 Grouping principles: Basic percepts 14.3 Musical grammar (or, can you hum ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor’?) 14.4 Perceptual prominence 14.5 How are we talking? (And what are we talking about?)

175

15. Persons as Music (and Finding the Groove)

183

16. Group Music, Identity and Society

193

17. Absence, Presence and Climate Control

205

18. Group Process and the ‘Inner Track’

213

19. Evaluating and Ending

221

In Conclusion Recommended Reading Subject Index Author Index

237 239 246 252

15.1 Negotiating the flow: Communicative musicality 15.2 Spotting the flow, creating the groove 15.3 Physical disability: Is ‘grooving’ possible? 15.4 Persons as music: Flowing and grooving 15.5 Concluding notes 16.1 Identities and roles: Shifts and stabilities 16.2 Public and collective stereotypes 16.3 Identity and health 16.4 Identity and music 16.5 Who’s who 16.6 Sounding ourselves (i) 16.7 A little divertimento 16.8 Sounding ourselves (ii) The inner track 16.9 What shall we sing-a-long? 16.10 In conclusion 17.1 Absence and presence 17.2 Shifting alliances: Musical and mental 17.3 Being present to absence 17.4 Thinking through 17.5 Present conclusions and absent certainties 18.1 Structure and directive work 18.2 Group phases and points of view 18.3 Cohesive and disruptive forces 18.4 Who’s the leader? (And who’s following?) 18.5 Keep listening! 18.6 Inconclusive thoughts 19.1 Evaluate what (And what’s evaluating)? 19.2 Why evaluate? 19.3 How do we evaluate? 19.4 What do you want to know? 19.5 The focus group evaluation 19.6 What do we do with all this information? 19.7 What to leave out? 19.8 End notes: How to end

List of Tables Table 1.1 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 4.1 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 17.1

The discourses we use in generating meaning 29 Selecting members? 43 Leaving the group 45 Group expectations and negotiated norms 50 Kinds of groups and kinds of membership 52 Sounds and instruments 59 Multiple aims: The public discourse 91 Primary and secondary aims – and professional overlaps 94 How present is your absence? 207

List of Figures Figure 1.1 Figure 5.1 Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 Figure 14.1 Figure 14.2 Figure 19.1 Figure 19.2 Figure 19.3 Figure 19.4

Fit(s) of meanings Overlapping cycles of the working year Aims, work contexts and discourses Group musicking ‘All SIT DOWN!’ ‘Are you ready, ev’ry body?’ Grouping: Similarity and difference Foreground and background Evaluation in context Collecting information The bottom line The questionnaire

30 69 93 95 109 113 176 178 226 227 228 234

Acknowledgements Although writing is, as always, a lonely task, various people made a difference. Gary Ansdell read the manuscript and said, ‘you need major restructuring’. Adri Prinsloo read many chapters and her detailed comments are every writer’s dream. I listened to both. Grant Davison was available, on hand, and at the end of the phone, ready to placate and to pop over when technology got the upper hand. Tania Leurquain said ‘take the time you need, and see you when I see you’, which gave me permission to become present to my Inner Track; while my family fed me when the fridge was empty, and kept my spirits on the hop. Finally, Chris Walton, Head of the Music Department at the University of Pretoria, was supportive and generous in allowing me time to ‘get on with it’. I thank them all.

Introduction: Music, Society and Shifting Music Therapy Vignette

We’re driving home from Lake Malawi, where we’ve been camping, fishing, snorkelling, painting, reading and swimming for the past three weeks.It is evening,we are some 50 km from the border with Mozambique, and since it is not safe to drive through Mozambique at night, we look for a place to pitch camp. Noticing a dirt track to our left, we leave the tarred road and drive slowly into the bush, hoping to find a small village. Soon enough, children appear. We signal to them that we would like to sleep on the land. The children run off and reappear with an old woman.Using sign language we explain our needs and she graciously allows us to pitch our tent. The children bring firewood, enabling us to have a quick supper and pitch our tent before nightfall. We find some gifts to offer the old woman,and walk to her hut in the darkness,led by the children. The old woman emerges from her hut with a grass mat, and we sit in a circle on the ground around the mat. My companion gently puts the gifts on the grass mat, and the old woman smiles and claps her hands in thanks.When the handing over of gifts is over we sit in silence, unable to speak with one another. The sky is brilliant, and we point to the stars, the children giggle, I am sleepy and want to retire. We hear some thudding music, and the children jump up and run off in the darkness – from which two young men emerge carrying a ghetto blaster, which they proudly put on the mat in the middle of our circle, and then squat down to join us. The music is an urban Western disco genre and I am astonished at this intrusion into the quiet 13

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noisiness of the African night. My companion signals to me to calm down, and tactfully and gently signals that the bush sounds are magnificent. Eventually, the fellows turn off the music. We once again sit together,harmoniously unable to speak with one another, until we are able to take our leave and, led by the children, we return to our tent.

Where does this book come from? My past 11 years of (at times reluctant) living in the southernmost tip of the African continent has alerted my music therapist’s sensibilities to two things: the compelling power of groups in music and the power of music to create electrifying collective experiences of social bonding. This in a nation with an inglorious history of social fragmentation, and a mistrust of difference. Like many places in the world, South Africa is not entirely comfortable with celebrating its social diversity; imbuing social ‘difference’ with nuances of ‘inferiority’ – with implicit derisiveness, nose-thumbing and racism. However, I have also experienced exhilarating public combustions when we have all, by magic, become as one, moving and being moved together by ‘music’ that seemed to enter our bones and collect us, in spite of ourselves, as one society celebrating itself. It is these experiences – some of which appear in this book – that have brought me to reconsider group music as meaning something vaster (and possibly more valuable) than listening to music or making music together. The core strategies of thinking and reflecting in this book are unambiguously embedded in the theory and practice of music therapy, which is my own professional background. The emergence of core music group strategies – in other words, of strategies that apply to all kinds of music groups – were precipitated by various experiences: •

an increasing curiosity and questioning of music’s capacity both to alienate and to bond people socially

•

the distance between music therapy discourses and social musical contexts, and

•

my tentative beginnings in the realm of music work with groups that did not want music therapy sessions, but who insisted that I run the music groups because of my music therapy work.

From all of these experiences ‘grew’ a cluster of group music work throughout the 1990s in South Africa, named ‘team-building’, ‘stress management’, ‘conflict resolution’, ‘improvisation groups’ – and other such parlances that

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framed the high-functioning world of adults who seemed to want group musical experiences, usually for non-musical ends. Here I dipped in and out of diverse contexts – mainstream schools, non-government organizations (NGOs), religious communities, counselling services, community support groups and academia, as well as offering music groups and improvisation workshops at home, for mothers and toddlers, busy adults, artists, women’s spirituality groups, musicians, arts therapists, mental health professionals and trainee priests. All of this felt a significant extension of the traditional music therapy territories of hospitals, mental health drop-in centres, centres or institutions for folk with disorder or disabilities; psycho-geriatric settings, residential nursing homes, special schools and so on. While this group work was not music therapy group work, my music therapist’s mind began playing with the meanings created by these rich and complex musical and personal experiences. At the same time, this non-music therapy work was generating thinking that began to impact on my music therapy thinking and practice, so that these began to shift. For a start, in Africa, the notion of a group self has primacy, which, of course, has fascinating resonances for any discipline or practice embedded in concepts that include notions of the person as an individual, and concepts such as self-development, personal autonomy and subjectivity. Another set of experiences informs this text: that of training and supervising music therapists in South Africa at the University of Pretoria. Here, an extraordinary range of practical contexts challenged my inherited Western/European music therapy thinking about therapeutic notions of boundaries, the therapeutic frame – and even of group music therapy itself. In African settings the notion of privacy is spurious, and some wonderful scenes remain in my memory. One is of running group music therapy sessions with young children in a Soweto clinic while, in the same physical space, their mothers and grandmothers had noisy gossip sessions, and every now and then called out comments or requests to their children. The music therapy session would slow to accommodate these requests, and eventually resume its momentum, once the mothers and children had concluded their exchanges – some of which involved singing songs, on request. Another scenario is of nurses at a hospital coming quietly into the music therapy room with their cups of tea and tired bodies, apparently recuperating by watching children have music therapy while they put their feet up and sipped their tea. At the time, I saw these as ‘interruptions’ to the session. Here, again, was my Western music therapy mindset! I came to understand that the nurses were doing far more than that! Far from intruding upon a private

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therapeutic space, their presence felt warm, nurturing, engaged. They were ‘angels watching over us’ at work and play. And yet the boundaries were clear: the children and I were engaged in therapeutic, confidential work – which could at the same time, be public. The quality of this ‘publicness’ was not that of voyeurism or detached curiosity: quite the contrary, our work seemed to receive ‘something’ from those in the room who were outside the therapeutic frame. Another shift has been in terms of understanding time. As musicians, we already know that music time is another kind of time: hardly linear or sequential and apparently unrelated to chronos. However, we all know that part of the social context in which we work has everything to do with chronos: rehearsals, sessions and lessons begin and end at a certain time. The African notion of time is maddeningly different to Western music therapists’ chronos-bound rigidity. More extraordinary still, the beginnings and endings of music sessions (and indeed of the music itself ) have had to be rethought. There is no place for thinking that ‘the session begins in ten minutes’, and ‘the session will last for forty minutes’, or even thinking ‘when everyone is there the music will begin’. We’ve learnt that the music needs to begin, even in the empty room. And, in any case, the room is not empty, because the music invites and calls the spirits and ancestors to join us. Bit by bit, folk trickle in – and trickle out – and somehow the group music goes on regardless. The session lasts for the amount of time needed for the music to sound and be sounded, and this has another time altogether, which we might think of as social-music time. Finally, in South Africa, selecting musical material for group sessions is tricky. It is not enough to know how to sing and dance the indigenous musical repertoire: its social functions (and taboos) need to be equally known and respected – as we’ll see in a moment. This, incidentally, is one reason why this book does not suggest musical material. I have learnt, in Africa, that music is context sensitive – rather different to the (Western) modern and material notion that music is an object that can be transported from one social context into another. Music therapy in South Africa is developing different social, musical and spiritual sensibilities, and I believe that these sensibilities may be useful to groups musicking in other social and regional contexts. All of these experiences and shifts in thinking combusted with the emergence of a new movement in music therapy calling itself Community Music Therapy – a movement drawing from the ‘music-centred’ approach flagged insistently by Gary Ansdell and Rachel Verney in the UK, Ken Aigen in the USA, and Brynjulf Stige and Even Ruud in Norway. The latter two, interest-

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ingly, have added social and cultural dimensions to this emphasis, allowing the theoretical landscape to be broader and more richly textured. This book emerges, then, from these splendid collisions between ‘modern’ (i.e. post-Enlightenment) and traditional and indigenous understandings of time, music, space and person; privacy and confidentiality; and traditional and indigenous embedded social norms and values. It seems to me that these meetings of different cosmologies to do with ‘music’, ‘healing’ and ‘society’ apply universally, in these times of mass immigration, refugees and deep crises of suspicion about ‘social difference’. It seems to me that music therapy theory and practice does and must offer something rich, complex and acutely inspired to group music-making across the boundaries of healing, teaching, learning, relaxing, performing and – simply – living in music. It is time – I believe – for us as music therapists to share the less visible aspects of our work and skills with others and, while doing so, also cultivate clarity about those aspects of group work that belong exclusively to music therapy, and those that are shareable, and open to being inspired and informed by other, adjacent practices.

Who should use this book? This book, then, is for anyone involved in group musicking. The word ‘musicking’ is from Christopher Small’s book of that name, and explains that rather than think of music as an object or product that exists separately from us as human beings, ‘musicking’ denotes that we are engaged in music, with music and through music – whether we listen, play, hum, dance or imagine it in our minds. In other words, if you’re a music teacher, music specialist, music therapist, church musician, community musician, orchestral conductor, choir leader, this book’s for you. If you’re a rock band musician, if you’ve been asked to run a music listening programme or a music appreciation group, if you’re a composer of music for groups, and if you’re looking to employ a musician in your institution, then read this book. If you’re training to be any of these, or thinking about training, the same applies. This book does not expect you to have knowledge or understanding of music therapy, neither will reading this book turn you into a music therapist. A special invitation, here, goes to musicians who work in religious contexts of whatever persuasion or culture. One of the epiphanies of the South African work has been the very thin distance between sacred and secular work. I have learnt not to confuse sacred with religious (or secular with a-religious or

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agnostic). I have learnt, also, that the sacred belongs within the secular and, possibly more often, vice versa. The profound nature of collective musical experience in Africa has kindled some questions to do with our role as musicians in collective social rituals – with a parallel awareness that religious collective rituals can be amazingly secular in flavour! Hence various sections throughout the book deal with the role of music in rituals and the group musical event as a form of social ritual. Thus, I hope that this book engages anyone involved in group musicking and, for this reason, the group music session is called just that (rather than therapy session, orchestral rehearsal, group improvisation, etc), even if the context or the focus of your work is clinical, community, religious, the concert stage or the classroom. The person ‘running’ the group I call the group leader or group facilitator – so as to include those whose work does not quite ‘fit’ into ‘neat’ professional categories, but whose imagination will enliven their reading of this book. Also, to avoid confusion if some of the contexts in the book seem inappropriate for your own kind of work, there is a paragraph near the beginning of each chapter that alerts you to what aspects of each chapter may interest your kind of work especially. It is important that you do not confuse the context of some of the vignettes and discussions with their content: although the context may seem unfamiliar and irrelevant to your own work, read on! The content of much group work is surprisingly familiar.

How does this book work (and play)? I’ve divided the text into three parts, planning, executing and reflecting. Each of these parts offers strategies, to get you to think about, and revisit, your own work: how you plan it, how you do it, and how you review it. In this sense, this book does not quite work like a normal book, in fact, this book is for playing with ideas – incidentally, a core strategy from music therapy thinking is the notion of play. Not just music, but playing with ideas, with planning, and within sessions. You do not need to read the chapters sequentially, and you might prefer to leap across sections and read the various bits to do with music and identity, or to do with group dynamics, musical structure or group norms. What I hope you’ve gleaned from all this is that this book does not tell you what kind of musicking to do in your groups; neither is this a handbook or manual, providing ideas for songs, pieces of music or other musical resources. Other books do this more than adequately. In any case, I am assuming that you have some group musicking experience. Having said that, the vignettes scattered

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throughout the book will give you plenty of ideas – as well as resonating with what you already do. Finally, I hope that my own professional community of music therapists will find this text useful – even if there is not too much traditional territory. The challenge for us, possibly, is to extend our practice, and contextualize it outside – as well as remaining inside – traditional territories of clinical work. Another hope is that group work might become a more significant part of music therapy practice, rather than something that we think about doing ‘as well as’ individual work.

Johannesburg, September 2002 Vignette It is the closing dinner at an African Continental Medical Conference, and after two hours of sitting with delightful colleagues, our table decides that it is time to ‘party’. The background music is bland and nauseating. However, nobody wants to get up and get the ball rolling. ‘You are the music therapist,’ they say, ‘why don’t you do something?’ An irresistible challenge. Zandile approaches me: ‘I hear you want to dance’, he says. We hatch a plan: to do a song-and-dance together on the ‘stage’ and invite others to join us. Since my knowledge of African songs is limited, I assure Zandile that if he starts, I’ll join in. After asking for the background music to be turned off, we do our impromptu performance. The applause is bored and condescending. Zandile slinks off. My musical blood is up and I am determined to continue. I approach a group of nurses from one of our music therapy training hospitals, and discuss with them how best to liven things up. They agree to do something together, calling another table to join us. We return together to the stage – and I find myself in the middle of a group of women singing, swaying, dancing and ululating in that delicious sensuous African way. Our group gathers energy and momentum,and within minutes we have expanded to some 50 people, on their feet cheering, hooting, clapping, whistling, swaying. The dancing group grows, we become more energetic, pouring with sweat and our bodies propelled by each other’s singing and dancing. It continues for almost two hours, making our own music as we sing, stamp, whistle, clap and move our bodies. The room has become one huge organism moving in music.

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The following morning – the last day of the conference – there is a new ‘knowing’ between the conference delegates. We greet one another warmly,and comment on the fun we had the evening before.

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

1.1 What am I doing here ? 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 con1

The title of Bruce Chatwin’s marvellous writings on travelling in ‘foreign parts’.

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stantly 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)?

PLANNING OUR DISCOURSES

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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.

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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

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‘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 an engagement with the outer track of the session, and at the same time, with the therapist’s own inner track of what is going on in the moment – and that includes speculating about the client’s inner track. Finally, part of music therapy practice is ongoing reflection, processing and speculating about what happened in the session. In other words, for the therapist the session does not end when the client (or client group) leaves the room and the time is up but, rather, continues in the therapist’s mind as well as in her reviewing of the session and in the supervision sessions with her clinical supervisor. Here, the therapist has another listening mind, to help her to make sense of the work and the client in as complex and inclusive a way as possible. This inclusive meaning includes the therapist’s personal feelings during the session, her feelings about the client and herself in relation with the client. This book encourages you to reflect about your own work: not just put it out of your mind at the end of your own group session, but to think about it, and, if necessary, to seek a mentor who can accompany your own reflections. This book, then, will, I hope, kindle your interest in that fascinating discipline and also, possibly, clarify for you the limits and boundaries of your own work. It will also alert you to ‘overtones’ and ‘undercurrents’ in your groups, and clarify for you when ‘what goes on’ in your groups requires a bit of help or even referring to a music therapist (or psychologist, counsellor, social worker). Let’s now leave aside music therapy, and think about the various discourses that might be useful in thinking and talking about group musicking.

1.3 Improvising our meanings The way that we understand, describe, and reflect about our work is inevitably informed by words and, as we know, words are not always helpful in talking about music. However, in these days of the ‘information highway’, most of us have access to the language of allied bodies of knowledge that are verbal, and are useful for our work, such as psychology, sociology and anthropology, musicology and music therapy, social music psychology and music sociology – to name a few.

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These bodies of knowledge each have a distinctive discourse as well as overlapping discourses common to more than one discipline. Any of these can help us to make sense of what we do, and here we need to be careful about how we use other discourses. For example, as a church musician, you will most likely talk about what you do using the discourses of religion, religious music and music performance. However, in talking about your work, you’ll do much more than just ‘import’ bits of discourses and hope that they more or less fit together! First of all, you’ll borrow what you need and discard what you do not need – a complex and highly selective mental process. Also, you will weave these various bits of meaning together in the way that best ‘means’ what you need to be meaning when talking about your work. In this book, then, I present meaning as that which we generate and construct as we think and speak. Thus, rather than there existing this body of pre-existing meanings that we can dip in and out of in order to make sense of our group work, we are all engaged in generating meaning. We also, at times, challenge it, extend it and discard it. We improvise meaning as we go along – and our meaning is no less rigorous for this! Meaning is highly dynamic, rather than fixed and static. It is also context bound: highly specific to what we do and where we are doing it. Thus, in a hospital we generate meaning about our work in a way that draws from the hospital discourse, while in the village hall we talk about our work another way altogether – even if we do very similar work in both places. As we saw earlier, our professional disciplines contribute to our creating of discourses: as a music teacher, I might speak and mean in a way that is different to the choir master who works in the same school, and possibly with the same children. This is not just because we do different things, it is also because our disciplines each have a body of knowledge, and discourses that informs how we talk about our work. Although, as musicians, we know that music also has its own meanings, with its own rigour and logic, the implication so far is that I am talking about meaning as tied to verbal language. This I am choosing to do since, even though what we ‘do’ as group musicians is musicking, this book is about how we mean what we do, and how we describe what we mean. It is the describing and explaining that I am interested in, for the moment. Let’s continue. If we now think about language as dynamic and socially generated, then we all know, for a start, that the meaning of words changes in different contexts, in different social groups and in different eras. Language is highly dynamic and context bound, and is also very subtly nuanced according to sub-cultures and social sub-groups. Some aspects of language are universal, so that most English speakers will understand the basics of the language, while other aspects of

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English are highly context specific (which is why I understand not a word of my brother-in-law’s Geordie-speak, which he assures me, is also English). Like meaning, then, language is socially constructed, and both universal and context specific. Let’s now think about existing discourses and how we might use – and abuse – these.

1.4. How considered is your discourse? Table 1.1 The discourses we use in generating meaning Discipline

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Therapy Medicine

X

X

Education Anthropology

Ethno-musicology

X

Community music

X

Music education

Psychology

Medical music therapy

Music

Medical sociology

X

Community music therapy

Sociology

Social music psychology

Social psychology

Discourse

X X

X

X X

X

X

X

X

Table 1.1 above shows different disciplines in the top row, making selective uses of discourses in the left hand column. These selections can be thought of as being woven together to generate meaning. Implicit in the Table is that some discourses are useful and some are not. Also implicit is that this weaving together is a considered act: we do not use a discourse when it is not useful to our context, discipline or approach.

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Figure 1.1 suggests that some discourses fit snugly with our own, whilst others are more challenging. However, what we also see is that those discourses that ‘fit’ are not necessarily more helpful to us than those that that do not. We see that where discourses fit comfortably with our way of meaning there is potential for rich thinking – and also for laziness and making assumptions about the ‘building blocks’ of our work. In the same way, discourses that feel distant, and that do not fit easily with our own, can nudge us to think more incisively, and encourage us to negotiate and question what we mean. At the same time though, less comfortable discourses can be discouraging. We might feel, at times, as though there is so much to be understood about what discourse means, before we can begin using it for ourselves.

Potential for rich meanings Too many assumptions of basic concepts

revising

Need constant

Discourses fit

Discourses do not fit

Complacency/lazy thinking/closed to generating rich/new discourse ‘False’ or ‘forced’ meanings are ‘borrowed’ Sporadic/coincidental meanings discourage reflection Basic concepts need questioning/negotiating Potential for generating rich/other/new discourse

Figure 1.1 Fit(s) of meanings

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1.5 Re-meaning comfort zones I hope, then, that this brief discussion (and this book) challenges you to think about your work, discourages you from drawing meaning too quickly, and encourages you to pursue your own improvising of meaning, even when you feel that making sense of your work remains somewhat obscure and complex. I also hope that you enjoy the vignettes: each is from a real life scenario, and some of the more spectacular ‘flops’ offer the most potential for reflection, and learning.

CHAPTER 2

Institutions, Idiosyncrasies and the Larger Picture All of us work within contexts that, whether or not we are aware of it, impact on our work, our group, and on ourselves. This chapter links with Chapter 7: Aims, Tasks, Roles and the Outer Track and also with Chapter 19: Evaluating and Ending.

2.1 Institutions as systems – with a bit of help from Systems Theory Systems Theory (Developed by Kurt Lewin and excellently described in De Board 1978) is useful in helping us to think of any group of persons as a whole comprised of different parts according to a particular scheme or plan. If we think of any group as a ‘system’, we see that various ‘parts’ are interconnected, associated and interdependent. Most organizations and working contexts – whether universities, schools, community centres, hospitals or NGOs (non-governmental organizations) – can be seen as a complex system of interrelated parts, each of which has a particular role and is mobilized according to the needs of the whole institution. Thus, the university accounts section is on high alert towards the end of the financial year, whilst for the faculty offices, registration week is the most critical. For teaching staff, the beginning of term and exam times are stressful, while for the departmental administrative support staff, the summer recess period is highly demanding, with a clearing away of old information and preparation for the new academic year – and so on. Some systems are closed, independent from other systems, or from the environment in which they exist and operate: here, we may imagine no exchange of energy between the group and its environment. The group apparently exists as a sealed entity. An example of a closed system is the cell battery, which has its own internal workings and eventually gets used up (although, of course, the speed 32

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with which it ‘dies’ depends on the kind of usage it is put to – in other words, what environment it operates within). In contrast, open systems are interconnected with one another and import/convey and exchange energy between them. They continuously change and adapt in relation with one another and, critically, they need the boundary between them to be sustained in order to maintain a dynamic equilibrium. In terms of this book we can think of a collection of persons in music as closed or open systems, existing within a larger one, whether a school, suburb, clinic or corporate organization. Thus, within the larger system, one of the smaller systems is the music group: the choir, orchestra, classroom, hospital ward, improvisation group, and so on. There are also other smaller, neighbouring systems, each of which is structured in specific ways in terms of hierarchies, skills, roles and expectations. All these smaller systems should be co-ordinated with one another, depending on the aims, tasks, needs and expectations of the whole system. As we know, however, there is often precious little co-ordination. The usefulness of Systems Theory here is that it alerts us to the fact that group musicking – in whatever context and of whatever kind – does not happen within a systemic vacuum. It is highly unlikely that you can sustain your music group as a closed system, separate from the larger system. This suggests that you need to develop a sense of acuity as to what is happening within the social/institutional context of your music groups. You cannot simply arrive each week, do your group work and leave. You need to develop a sense of how the greater system is structured; how its various parts relate and co-exist with one another; which part of the whole system your work belongs in, and who your systemic neighbours are. If you find that you don’t belong in the greater system, you need to consider where and how your work might find a place within the whole. Before doing this, however, you need to have a good idea of how this system works, and what it’s about.

2.2 The first approach: Overt and covert mission, vision and values Most groups, institutions or organizations have some kind of purpose that is overt and stated tangibly, e.g. training, entertainment, care, worship or development. Here is the public face of the institution, how it chooses to present itself to the world. At the same time, though, there are strata of institutional values, ethos, hidden agendas and less visible nuances. All of these are part of the

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‘system’, and you need to get a sense of the institution as a whole and as a sum of parts, in order to grasp how the larger system ‘works’, and where and how your work fits with it. Whether you’re approaching a special school, a residential nursing home, an orphanage, a drop-in centre, parish church or training institution, you need to familiarize yourself with the institution’s values, vision and approaches to fulfilling its purpose. As well as their public label or brand name, some institutions have a mission statement or vision, usually crafted by the institution itself. Other institutions have no overt vision or mission statement, and you’ll need to ‘decode’ this by talking with people across the hierarchies in the system – which takes time and energy. At the same time, though, you do need to get a sense of the ethos of the place in which you hope to work. Thus, while the public label may be ‘care centre’ and the mission statement may say something about dignity in old age, the ethos may be bio-medical, religious, holistic or whatever. You also need to be clear about your own working ethos, mission and vision. For example, you may present yourself as a community musician, and have an ethos grounded in religion – which results in your overriding interest in a gospel choir…which is all very well, but how does this fit with the vision and ethos of the context in which you hope to work? If, from what you’ve managed to find out, your work or approach does not fit, then at least you are aware of this, and can negotiate with the institution and, one hopes, generate mutual respect about your differences. If you don’t know that your work does not ‘fit’, then you risk operating as a closed system, independent from your environment. Rather like the cell battery, you’ll run out of ‘juice’ eventually. If, on the other hand, you take time and trouble to inform yourself and negotiate (rather than impose) your work and aims with those of the institution you should have the beginnings of an open system, whereby your work and theirs will exchange energy, sustaining a dynamic mutual equilibrium between you. There is always potential for change in attitudes and views: those of the institution as well as your own (!) If you do not feel that you connect with, or ‘fit’ with the ethos, and assuming that you have decided to work there in any case, then maintain open channels of communication and believe in your work. Rather like an open system, allow for exchanges of views and opinions between you! I mentioned briefly the need to form relationships with staff at all levels of the hierarchy. The next section explores this.

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2.3 Staff, hierarchies and power In my experience, members of staff from the context in which you work can be a source of invaluable support: friendly, welcoming and helpful. They can also be amazingly obstructive: obdurate, inscrutable, unhelpful: by simply ignoring you, ‘forgetting’ (week after week) that it is music time; or by not informing you that someone has resigned, left the group, been discharged from hospital or has died – so that you find out by walking into the room and finding someone else in that bed. Unsurprisingly, when these sins of omission happen regularly, your work energy will plummet as soon as you think about that bit of the week’s work. It is time to do some homework. The rule is, quite simply, to cultivate co-operative and mutually respectful working relationships with everyone involved in, and around, the music group. If you run community music groups, make sure you know who’s who, from funders, managers, caretakers to cleaners and volunteers. As a part-time music teacher/conductor/music therapist, you may have to do an inordinate amount of groundwork before even beginning your ‘music work’, as well as continuing to monitor what’s going on in that context. This all takes time and energy – and is the only way to ensure a smooth journey for yourself and your work. Here are some fundamental guidelines about sustaining open channels with staff and colleagues. (Feel free to add others of your own.) •

Take time to greet people each week (living in Africa, this is a given: one does not begin to engage with anyone, until the proper greetings have been attended to). At times, staff at the bottom end of the work hierarchy have low self-esteem, are used to being ignored, yet – in my experience – can be an invaluable source of support. You need to ‘walk with kings and keep the common touch’ (to misquote Kipling’s poem). Those with more ‘power’ are not necessarily your best allies in terms of offering you support and advice. And vice versa.

•

Find out about the global as well as the local hierarchies and channels of communication of the workplace. Large institutions are amazingly complex, and you need to inform yourself about their structure. You do not operate in a vacuum – as a closed system.

•

Ask to attend a staff/parish or community/board meeting and introduce yourself and your work before you begin or, at least, at the very beginning of your work – to make sure that everyone knows who you are and what you hope to do.

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Find out about channels of reporting/thanking/complaining (both formal and informal).

•

Establish what kind of reporting/feedback is wanted from you: this may differ from place to place, and the ‘board’ that funds your work may want different reporting from the staff who are ‘on the ground’ in your place of work. Be flexible in providing for different expectations and demands.

•

Be meticulous about feedback to staff. In clinical/rehabilitation or specialized contexts make sure that you report on anything you notice that is different or unusual about someone or the group as a whole. Ask staff for feedback, suggestions and support.

•

Inform staff – especially in residential institutions – when you’re leaving each week. Say goodbye! This is an excellent way of reminding them of your presence – and departure.

•

Inform staff if you’ll be absent, on leave, when you’re ill, doing exams and so on.

•

Be sure to have the necessary contact details of the institution in case you need to call or fax, and leave your own details in the ward/school/institution. Also ask staff to inform you if there is a planned (or unexpected) outing – so you don’t arrive and find an empty school.

•

Engage with the ward/school/nursing home social celebrations and festivals – by offering to be a part of the Christmas concert, or rituals at Easter, Eid, Hanukkah or whatever the local culture happens to be.

•

Ask for help when you need it – you may need to learn about past history and customs: there may be existing institutional traditions to do with particular days or times of the year.

•

Maintain a visible profile – contribute to the institutional newsletter/magazine/community mouthpiece/circulars to parents/local church group/local newspaper, etc.

•

Don’t be a martyr or a messiah – if something doesn’t work, talk about it with staff, ask for suggestions, advice and so on.

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Vignette 2a Some years ago I approached a large psychiatric hospital for permission to introduce music therapy training placements on the wards.My request was received with enthusiasm by the Medical Superintendent, the Head of Psychiatry and a consultant psychiatrist, all of whom pledged their support, and assured me that they would spread the word around the hospital.Some weeks later,assured of their backing,I began to approach the various wards – and was met with blank gazes, lack of interest and passive hostility. I got the message and quickly regrouped. I introduced myself to the Head of Nursing Administration, and eventually she suggested a meeting with all the nursing matrons.The meeting lasted almost three hours.In true African style,it began with greetings and introductions – with each of us saying something about who we were. I talked very simply about music, asked them what music meant in their own lives, and introduced the notion that we would like to do mainly group music sessions with hospital patients – how did they feel about this, would the nurses be interested in joining in, and so on. By the end of the meeting I was noting down suggestions from the matrons as to what music they thought the nurses and patients might like to sing and play. The music therapy clinical training programme at this hospital has never looked back. Bar one or two wards with complicated dynamics, the nurses welcome us, they know that I supervise the students and often greet me with a story or two about the students’ work. In return, I keep in close contact with the matrons of the ward, give regular feedback on the ‘most helpful and most supportive’ wards (and, by omission, on the less helpful ones); and last year, at the Head Matron’s request, the students presented a half-day symposium on music therapy, hosted by the hospital, to which matrons and senior nursing staff from all hospitals in the province were invited. Over a hundred attended. Had I side-stepped the nursing hierarchy, this story would read rather differently. By choosing to ask the nurses for their support, our programme gained the support of those ‘on the ground’. Practical support from the (more powerful and senior) medical staff continues to be rather thin in this hospital.

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As this story shows, it may not necessarily help to have enthusiasm and support from the higher echelons – only. Often staff members on the ground (whether nurse aides, care workers, teaching support staff, cleaners) are your best allies. They know the children/adults/pupils – as well as the entire set-up – better than most, and certainly better than doctors or nursing matrons. You need to get to know them – and them you.

2.4 Getting trapped All these suggestions assume – rather naively – a homogeneous and harmonious whole system, rather like some great symphony, into which you will fit smoothly and find your part in the system. The realities in any institution, whether church, school, community centre, hospital or therapy clinic, are often different, with envy, professional jealousies, rivalries and a close guarding of professional turfs. You could unwittingly find yourself in a minefield, trespassing innocently on others’ professional turfs, or seriously annoying someone who secretly hankers after your role. Intra-institutional conflicts can cause enormous personal stress – especially when unacknowledged, unidentified and unaddressed. This is generally to do with how the institution works, or does not work, rather than with you personally – although, of course, you may be fuelling conflicts and dynamics that already exist. You, as the ‘music person’, may symbolize to bored, burnt-out or envious staff members, something to do with fun, entertainment, creativity and caring. Moreover, as a part-time incomer, you do not have to deal with the daily ‘wear and tear’ of cleaning, caring for residents, nor are you subjected to the ongoing dynamics of the institutions. A consequence of any of these, often invisible, institutional dynamics is that you become the target of some uncomfortable ‘digs’ – or even overt acts of aggression that sabotage your work – and you’ll need insight, alertness, self-reflection and courage to ‘keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you’ (to further misquote Kipling’s poem). In other words, you need to be clear as to which aspects of these acts (or nuances of acts) levelled at or against you have to do with you, personally, and which have to do with the institution itself, or with that person’s own issues. Here, the person’s own incapacity to acknowledge and deal with their own difficulties can be greatly alleviated by ‘blaming it on you’. You can become the target of their negative feelings, which will make you feel awful, and them powerful.

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Another complication is that there may be overt and tangible alliances in the institution, and each tries to get you onto their ‘side’. This can be enormously stressful and complicated since, as a newcomer, you do not want to offend – or receive unpleasantness from – the ‘other’ side. Music therapists generally have supervision from a peer or a professional in allied fields – e.g. social workers, psychologists, psychotherapists or other arts therapists – and this is an invaluable source of support, helping the therapist to ‘sort out’ what is going on; how it makes sense emotionally and how to ‘manage’ the complications within the institution. Although supervision is generally part of the therapy professions, there is no reason for you not to find a similar person: someone able to listen openly and non-judgementally, and help you to gain insight as to what is going on in the work-place. What is critical, in any case, is for you to remain alert to the inside track of any work context: in other words, to what is not always overt and tangible, and impacts on you and your group musicking. Keep open channels of reporting, listening and communicating; keep yourself informed of literature on group work (like this book); seek support from your line manager and – most important – sustain a self-reflective stance. The more you are able and willing to think about what is going on, the better for you and for your group work.

2.5 Summing up In this chapter we’ve looked at the wider context for music groups. We’ve used basic concepts from Systems Theory to underpin the notion that any work context is made of parts – which do not always co-exist comfortably with one another. We’ve considered the nature, ethos, mission and visions of the structures external to your group work, which we might think of as the ‘scaffolding’ that can support – and obstruct – your work. We’ve also seen that the institutional structures, staff roles, hierarchies and dynamics can have significant impact on the internal structures, roles and dynamics of your own work and on the group musicking. In the next chapter, we zoom in a little closer: how you form groups, how they fit within the institutional context, and how you understand and describe the aims, tasks and roles of your work within the institution.

CHAPTER 3

In-groups, Out-groups, Norms and Membership Whether you’re auditioning folk for your rock band, advertising for a music appreciation group, selecting folk for your music and social skills group or working with a class group, with no say in the group membership, this chapter is for you. We all need to think about who’s in the group – and who’s out. We also need to think about what we say we’re doing in our sessions, and what we’re not doing, and how any of this meets – or might not meet – with the group’s expectations. This chapter is not context bound. In other words, irrespective of whether you have a say on the nature of your music group, these planning strategies will help you to consider issues to do with ‘group management’.

3.1 Why spend so much time on this kind of planning? Music therapists generally think carefully about what kind of music therapy groups to institute in specific settings: this is to do with whether the group is open or closed, long-term or short-term, and selecting membership. Each of these has an impact on the relationships that develop within the group and between the group and the working context or institution. It is these planning strategies that are presented here, to help you consider the complexities and nuances of setting up a music group. Rather like the idiosyncratic nature of institutions, group membership is a multilayered phenomenon. As we saw in the last chapter, the group exists within the context of a larger group, be it the school, community centre, hospital, college or church, and needs to fit within this whole system. Also, although the group is a collection of persons with a common focus and purpose, at the same time, constantly emerging and shifting sub-groups form within the music group. These shift within each session, and from one session to the next. These subgroups are not necessarily defined by the explicit roles of the 40

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members. In other words, I am not suggesting that sub-groups are defined by, say, the instrumental sections of an orchestra, the different voices of a choir, or even the different kinds of abilities (e.g., high, medium or low) within a classroom or group who have come together to play music. Rather, I am thinking of the interpersonal alliances and allegiances that emerge whenever folk come together, and how these can impact on your own role as group facilitator. It is because of these group dynamics, which are often invisible and intangible, that the external scaffolding of your group work is given so much attention in this chapter. This chapter, then, considers this external scaffolding in some detail, beginning with the selection of members for your group, and then considering various kinds of group formats, and the duration of your work together. Even if you have little choice in group membership or in the length of the group’s work together (e.g. as a class music teacher or a musician-in-residence at an institution), this chapter will alert you to issues that can impact on the group as a whole.

3.2 In-groups and out-groups In his classic book on group work, psychologist Irvin Yalom begins by talking about the fundamental distinction between groups with ‘in-patients’ or ‘residents’ (i.e., folk who know one another through being in the same place on a daily basis), and groups with those who do not know one another and come together specifically for the group session. Each of these scenarios impacts on your work. People who live or work together – whether in a school setting, a private or public sector organization, a residential home, church, hospital ward or prison – have an experience of one another beyond the music group. This group of people may together have other group sessions – like art classes or a life skills group – with another facilitator. Here, the very same group has another way of relating not only to one another, but also to a facilitator. You, as the group worker, are ‘the outsider’. These pre-existing relationships have a separate and ongoing history, timbre and momentum, and are embedded in a different ‘life’: one that parallels your group sessions. Also, what happens inside your sessions is likely to impact on the other relationships that continue between group members in-between your sessions. Here, we’re thinking about contexts where people bring into sessions this other knowing of one another, which is likely to be different from their experience of one another during the music group. In

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other words, your group work potentially creates ‘other’ relationships between the same persons in a residential or daily-living context. You might think that these other group dynamics might not concern you. Wrong! You need to be alert for pre-existing relationships and dynamics between people in the group. This, incidentally, is similar to sustaining alertness to how the parts fit in with the whole – as discussed in the previous chapter. Here too, the parts of the system can overlap, resulting in some split loyalties amongst group members. (For instance, Andrew is the ‘rebel’ in the art group, constantly challenging Mrs X’s patience. Since in the music group he is with the same group members, he may feel compelled to be the rebel in your group too – as a result of peer pressure and group expectations – when, in fact, he’d like to be one of the group without a prominent role.) Another scenario may be that the group lets you know that you are a far better facilitator than Mrs X; or that they have much more fun with the gym teacher, and so on. This is about playing off one part of the whole system against the other (which is why you need to establish and sustain open channels of communication with colleagues in the working context!). If the group insists that you are ‘better than’ or ‘worse than’ the other facilitator(s), you need to reflect, with someone else, on what this means. Beware of literally and personally feeling approved of, or criticized, by the group. You, as leader, symbolize all sorts of figures of authority and leadership, and the group will very quickly tend to imbue these figures with all sorts of feelings that may have little to do with you personally. Here, again, music therapists have access to supervisors who accompany them in their work, and there is no reason for you not to find a mentor to help you sort out issues that arise in groups. This may be your line manager, or a colleague or group specialist outside the institution. It is critical that you have a platform to discuss, reflect and exchange experiences about your sessions within the institution too: you need to liaise closely with teachers, nurses, care-workers or whoever – and, if necessary, provide support for one another. In contrast to residential or unchanging daily settings, the out-group members may be rivals, strangers, nodding acquaintances, siblings, friends, lovers, and a mixture of all of these. Here, although not paralleling relationships in other sessions or other contexts, the group dynamics will be as complex as that of in-groups. Also, out-groups may present the issue of whether, and how, to select people for your groups, with the inevitable implications of inclusiveness and exclusivity. There are at least two kinds of scenarios here: people who do not know one another, which, in one sense, makes the selection process less rivalrous; and a pre-existing group (for example a church congregation or village community),

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only some of whom are selected for your session. The latter is a specific group that is also part of a larger group. On what basis is the ‘church choir’ distinct from the ‘church congregation’? Think about it – is your screening transparent, in the sense that the ‘selecting’ of members is clear; or is it slightly blurred, with the inevitable (at times hidden) feelings of resentment at being excluded, and a kind of snobbishness at being ‘in’?

3.3 Group membership: Being selective about selections? The out-group scenario has naturally given rise to the issue of who is in the group – and how they get there. Let’s tease out some possibilities as to why you might be in a position to select your group members – and why not. Table 3.1 shows that this is often out of your hands, and is more likely to be the result of what kind of group you’re doing and the context for your work. Table 3.1 Selecting members? You have a say in selecting (Group members have some say in self-selecting)

On the basis of: • musical screening (auditions) • psychological screening (interview) • nature of disability (fit with group) • musical/personal ‘fit’ with group

You have some say in selecting (**Group members have some say in selection)

On basis of: • referrals/requests from colleagues • responses to an advertisement** • response to a call for volunteers** • coincidental time and place of

persons (e.g. traumatic event or rehearsal schedule)

You have no say in selecting (**Group members have some say in selection)

• Pre-existing group (class, ward) • You have an ‘open door’ policy**

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We’re beginning to see that whether and how you select group members depends on the nature and ethos of the group context, your brief from the institution or employer, and on your own theoretical orientations. For example, with the church (or school) choir or instrumental ensemble, you’ll select people on the basis of musical skills: generally you’ll have an audition to screen potential members. In other settings, you may select folk on the basis of ‘needs’, such as ‘support groups’ for recovering drug addicts, for single parents, for parents of disabled children or cancer survivors. Another way of selecting a group is on the basis that all members have in common a particular interest, e.g. a love of Wagner (for your music appreciation sessions on The Ring) or a love of singing, or a shared interest in de-stressing, or rehearsing for the Christmas concert in the local village hall. If your theoretical orientation is psychoanalytic, and you are setting up a group that focuses on the relationships that emerge within the group, then you may wish to select people who do not know one another, and make it a condition of group work that they do not have contact with one another outside sessions. However, where fees are involved, there is inevitably another self-selecting process. Even after you have ‘selected’ the group members (e.g. by advertising a music appreciation course on Wagner’s Ring on local radio) the ultimate selection hurdle is the payment of group membership ‘fees’. On the other hand, you may have no selection procedure at all and have an open door policy, where whoever feels like coming at any time, arrives. This is not a great idea if you are preparing for a performance or public musical event! At the same time, you may have little say in how to select members – or whether to select them at all – since this may be part of the ethos of your working context. You may simply be asked to work with the whole of class X or ward B. You may also – at times – need to consider whom to remove from the group and why (see Table 3.2 on page 45). To some extent, this depends on the selection procedure. Any of the acts or behaviours listed in Table 3.2 may suggest a person’s unreadiness to be part of a group: as a result of social, physical-neurological problems; emotional-relational disturbance or disorder; or because the group musicking does not meet their needs or expectations. It may also be that you are not paying attention, and not aware that this person needs something different. You need to be alert to balancing group needs and individual needs and, where the group cannot meet a person’s needs, you need to refer them to another group or to a professional colleague, or review their membership with them directly. This, of course, depends on the kind of work you’re doing, and the premise on which the group is formed (and members selected) in the first place.

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Table 3.2 Leaving the group Group considerations

• Person disagrees with the group norms and

negotiates to leave

• Person interferes with the needs of the group (e.g.

needs your individual focus and energy)

• Person prevents the group from realizing its

potential (e.g. musical/personal skills are insufficient)

• Person prevents you from doing your work (e.g.

passive or active sabotaging of your aims)

Individual considerations

• Person has poor sense of personal boundaries • Person is disturbed by group experiences • Person has insufficient musical/inter-personal

skills

We see, here, that even before you begin working with your groups, the issue of who’s in and who’s out has all kinds of implications, both for those who become members and those who do not. Let’s leave aside group selection for the time being, and take a small detour into group dynamics and group process, which is already colouring the planning and preparing of group music work.

3.4 Group process: A brief introduction We will explore group process in much more detail in Part Three of this book. For now, this brief introduction serves to alert you to the undercurrents and overtones of any music group work. In other words, things are not necessarily as straightforward or uncomplicated as they seem. Group Theory1 informs us that people who come together in a new way or for the first time tend to be well disposed towards the group facilitator and to one another. Once members become more familiar with one another, all sorts of relational issues begin to emerge, as we’ll see throughout this book. What is helpful in any kind of group work is for you to have a basic understanding of 1

The term Group Theory is used loosely here, and refers to a vast literature about group work.

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group process, generally understood as the dynamic relationships, undercurrents, various nuances, stages and phases that ongoing groups tend to go through. These processes are generally invisible, but once you inform yourself about these, it can help to understand why, for instance, you’ve had a particularly difficult rehearsal and everyone seems unco-operative (and you feel so exhausted and stressed), or why your improvisation group was so successful (and you feel satisfied and exhilarated), even if the musicking was not that impressive. These feelings are not coincidental, and neither has more value than the other, and it does help to dip into other bodies of knowledge to help make sense of what goes on during groups musicking. There are many formulations of group process by various psychologists and group analysts. One useful (and fairly simple) model is Tuckman’s, which describes four phases of group life: norming (everyone identifying what they have in common), storming (identifying how different they are from one another), forming (coming together once again with a more realistic and balanced understanding of one another), and performing (the group functions as a whole, aware of similarities and differences, and performing its tasks). In other words, when a group is being especially fractious and difficult, and you understand the theoretical concept of the ‘storming’ phase, this can help you to manage and contain the fractiousness without feeling that you are losing control, losing the plot, or necessarily a ‘bad’ musician, teacher, conductor, 2 therapist or group worker. This can make an enormous difference to the quality of your group work, and to building trust in the group – with the spin-off, inevitably, of the group musicking as a cohesive unit. Similarly, while it is always tempting to take credit for one’s efforts and preparation, this may have as much (if not more) to do with the dynamics in the group at the time, as with you. The point about understanding group process and dynamics is that this helps you to reflect on, make sense of, and prepare for your sessions. If you have a mentor who can help you to process what is going on in your work, your acts as facilitator will be qualitatively rich, which will have very subtle – and powerful – spin-offs on the quality of the group relationships, the tasks of the group and the end product of your work together. For the time being I leave aside group dynamics (although you can read more in Chapter 18), and return to considering what kinds of groups to set up.

2

This is an over-simplistic link, inevitably, to alert you to existing theory and literature.

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3.5 What kind of group? (How long, how short?) Let’s now think about ongoing groups, short-term or one-off groups, since each of these has different profiles that impact on what musical activities you prepare, as well as how you think about the work.

3.5a The one-off group In my experience, one-off groups are usually on a consultative basis. For example, as a string specialist you are asked to do a workshop with the string section of an orchestra or, as an African musician, you rehearse a choir for fine-tuning some pronunciation. Or you may be doing ‘team building’ or ‘conflict resolution’ – or simply ‘music improvisation group’ with a school staff team, or whatever. How you ‘manage’ the one-off session depends on numerous factors, some already stated: i.e., whether folk come together for only one session or whether this is a ‘pilot’ session, prior to longer-term work at some later stage; whether or not they already know one another; whether your brief is clear; whether the group is clear about your brief, and so on. For one-off sessions you need to be especially well prepared – and in some ways, this is the most difficult setting. Consider the purpose of the session: your brief; what the institution/employer want; how adequately they’ve briefed you; what the group itself hopes to achieve; how the group sees its own focus and aims; what you are able to provide during this time, and so on. Here, especially, you need to spend time setting norms at the beginning of the session. Setting norms can be as brief as going round the group and checking that everyone knows why they are here, and why you’re there – you’d be surprised! (More in 3.6 about Setting Norms.) Also, make sure that you do a group evaluation at the end of your session. This is very useful to check how useful folk found your session, what suggestions they might have to change some of the things you did. (Be sensitive as to whether the group is only telling you what they think you want to hear.) Often it is useful to state, at the beginning of the group evaluation, that this is not about wanting to know that it was a ‘good’ or ‘useful’ session but rather, to check how the group found the session, and what suggestions they have if this kind of session were to be repeated either with them or another group. This can be an unthreatening way of giving the group permission to say what worked and what did not – provided, of course, that you have the courage and openness to ‘hear’ the ‘whole’ story. Also, don’t for a minute think that because your experience of the session was positive, this was the same for the group – or vice versa.

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3.5b The short-term group Here, a scenario might be that you’ve negotiated a fixed-term contract with a group of people or with an institution, e.g. six sessions on a weekly basis, with the same people attending each week. Critical here is to have the commitment of full attendance from all members. In other words, you’re wanting a ‘closed group’, which we’ll talk about later. Even if your brief is overtly musical (e.g. preparing the end-of-year concert or offering short-term music training for brass players), remember that this is also a context within which group members will get to know one another. If they already know one another, then they will get to know one another in a new way, and also bond with one another through the shared experience. For you, the short-term group offers intense personal dynamics, and you need to be sensitive to emerging relationships, ways of relating, alliances and cliques, since these will amplify, especially towards the end of your work together. By keeping track of the emerging group dynamics (without necessarily acting upon them), you are well placed to offer optimal musical and personal experiences. This is surely one of the aims of any kind of group work. 3.5c The long-term group Some of the vignettes in this book present long-term scenarios such as a weekly session over the period of one year. Here I’m thinking of the university choir, the regional orchestra, the class music period in a school or ongoing music improvisation, appreciation, or therapy group. There is plenty of time for all of you to form relationships with one another through music, and to get to know one another in an ongoing way. Incidentally this does not mean that the relationships will be ‘deeper’ and more ‘intense’ than in the short-term group. They will be ‘different’, with more time (in the sense of chronological time) to ‘get to know’ one another. This is provided that the group membership remains stable over a period of time. This brings us to other kinds of groups: closed, open, and semi-closed groups. And once again, we’re facing the issue of group norms: what does the group expect, and what do you expect from them? Are you sure you share a common understanding of expectations? In reading the next section, bear in mind that each of the sections and sub-sections in this chapter interact with one another. This means that you need to think about group norms within your own work setting, and also within the context of the preceding sections, as well as those that follow, on closed/open groups. Each of these converges with one another.

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3.6 Setting norms I’ve already hinted at the notion of setting norms. This can be understood as the negotiating, by the group, of group goals, eliciting expectations from group members, setting group values as well as a code of conduct. Setting norms is an external process, which is stated and done explicitly at the beginning of your work together as a group. Incidentally, although the setting up of group norms has psychological and relational implications, you’ll soon see that most work contexts have group norms, even if these are not necessarily negotiated or talked about overtly. It is critical for the optimal functioning of your group that group norms be negotiated with group members – rather than you imposing the norms as a condition of group membership, and then forgetting about them. Thus, even if pre-set norms include session time, duration and place (e.g. rehearsals every Tuesday, 20h00–22h00 in the community centre), the purpose of sessions and conditions for granting absence from sessions, and even if these are part of the conditions of joining the group, most of us know that these need re-visiting, with the group, from time to time. Setting norms needs to be done at the very beginning of your work together and, be warned, it may take a bit of time to reach a common understanding. Also, norms may need to be re-negotiated. In his excellent book Working More Creatively with Groups, Jalrath Benson (1987) suggests keeping norms simple. Although he talks from social work/ psychology/therapeutic perspectives, some of the norms will resonate with everyone. He suggests that group norms include punctuality, full attendance, mechanisms for notifying you of absence, criteria for missing sessions, commitment to ‘homework’ between sessions, non-judgemental attitudes, confidentiality, and so on. Your norms may include payment of fees at the beginning of each session, tidying up the music room, taking care of instruments, ensuring that the music space is securely locked and alarmed, and so on. Table 3.3 presents norms negotiated at a community arts group, at the beginning of a three-day workshop. These norms were a natural extension of first eliciting the group’s expectations. As facilitators (there were four of us), we then responded to the group’s expectations, clarifying what we could and could not offer during the three days. In this sense, the norms were negotiated by us all – and this process took two hours.

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Table 3.3 Group expectations and negotiated norms Group’s expectations

Group contract

Heal ourselves

Mobiles off (or buy everyone chocolate)

Play

Active participation

De-stress

Take care of ourselves

Enhance our existing skills

Honour one another’s experiences

Discover/learn other ways of working

Be non-judgemental

Tap our creativity

Create our own ‘safety’ and ‘holding’

Unblock/release our creativity

Work at our own pace

Help children to play

Confidentiality

Help children through the arts

Be punctual

New ways of thinking about what we do All help with cleaning and tidying the space Network amongst ourselves Exchange and share ideas and skills

Respect one another’s languages/culture/work Communicate our needs

Be direct and honest in feedback

Setting norms allows you all to invite expectations, share your visions as a group – and also share what the group does not want from the sessions! You also need to discuss how, as a group, you ensure that the norms are respected by all members. You may need to enter into a ‘contract’ with the group, and discuss how to address the ‘breaking’ of norms. What we see here is a co-operative attitude towards defining how the group will operate. Of course, some work contexts have pre-set norms as part of the institutional ethos. Make sure you familiarize yourself with these, or you may find yourself setting group norms that go against the institutional ethos – and be in a bit of trouble! Alternatively, if the institutional ethos and norms do not quite work for the kind of group you are running, then you need to discuss this very clearly with your line manager, head teacher, employer or whoever, and formulate some mutually acceptable territory for group norms before you begin your sessions!

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Vignette 3a I was recently part of an ‘Arts in the Community’ twelve-day workshop. The twelve days were structured in four three-day workshops, spread over three months. Those who signed up were required to sign a ‘contract’ stating that they would attend all twelve days. As ‘arts facilitators’ the four of us (art, drama, movement and music community workers and arts therapists) were also required to commit ourselves to the twelve days. During the first plenary session, we went through the group norms: the expectations of how the group would ‘run’ for the next twelve days. The norms included issues to do with punctuality, acceptance of one another, confidentiality, honesty and attendance. ‘Sasha’ raised her hand and explained that there was a family wedding on day ‘4’, and she wanted to check whether she could miss that day. The director of the project reminded her – and the group – that their acceptance for the workshop had been conditional to their signing a contract in which they undertook to attend all of the twelve days. Moreover, numerous people had been turned away because they could not commit themselves to full attendance. There followed a plenary discussion as to how best to deal with this, and the agreement was reached that – since it was not an immediate family member but a second-cousin who was getting married – on the day of the wedding Sasha would leave the workshop at 14h00 instead of 17h00. Three days into the workshop, during the facilitators’ morning tea break, we all commented that ‘Tom’ was looking stressed and seemed to be mentally and emotionally absent. We then heard that his aunt’s funeral was the following day and he was in agony about asking for permission to miss that day, having witnessed the discussion around Sasha’s request. Naturally we were upset that Tom had not felt able to raise this issue with any of us, and at our lunch-time facilitators’ meeting we wondered whether we had been inflexible in dealing with Sasha’s request in the opening plenary. Luckily we still had the afternoon to address Tom’s dilemma, and decided that one of us would do this with him on a one-to-one basis,since we felt that he was emotionally fragile, and to discuss this in the day’s closing plenary might have been overwhelming for him. We addressed Tom’s absence

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at the following day’s opening plenary, and after the funeral Tom was welcomed back into the workshop with much gentleness and warmth by the whole group. I am sure the point has been made: of course we need group norms and a commitment from group members for any closed group, whether short- or long-term, but we also need to be realistic in terms of people’s life events and circumstances. If issues regarding attendance, trust, confidentiality and expectations are worked through in a realistic way as part of the setting of group norms, then these will not interfere with group work. At the same time we need to be acutely alert to the discomfort, anxiety or extreme stress that these norms may cause someone, due to unforeseen circumstances. In other words, norms may need revisiting at various points, especially with long-term group work. Generally, for the short-term closed group, a commitment to attend all sessions is critical for group commitment and cohesion, for optimal group work, especially if preparing for a performance, or if your focus is for the group process to emerge and be addressed meaningfully. Table 3.4 Kinds of groups and kinds of membership One-off group

Short-/fixedterm group

Ongoing group

(

(

(

Semi-open group

(

(

Open group

?

(

Closed group

3.7 Closed, open and semi-open groups We have already touched on the distinction between one-off, long- and short-term groups, and also on the ‘in’ and the ‘out’ group. Each of these – in various combinations – foster different kinds of musical and personal interactions. To complicate (and enrich!) matters further, the issue of ‘open’, ‘closed’ or ‘semi-open’ groups also impacts on your work.

3.7a The closed group Here the membership is stable, and all members are expected to be present for all sessions. Closed groups may be short-term, as with the coming together of a

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group for a specific purpose, after which the group disbands. Remember that in residential settings or schools, you need to negotiate a commitment from staff to support you and the group members in attending the sessions. As we’ve already seen, keeping open channels of communication with all parts of the ‘system’ is essential to quality group work, especially in settings with live-in residents. This can go some way to ensuring that group members – especially truant children and adolescents – don’t fob you off with ‘excuses’ for absence that are rather hollow (since you’ve done your homework and know that the institution is 100% behind full session attendance). Even if the purpose of your work is explicitly musical or task orientated (e.g. preparing for a performance) you need to be alert for the potential, in sessions, for some powerful relationships. Think, here, of the feelings of belonging, group bonding and achievement generated by a group working together towards a performance. Now think of a parallel scenario: the three-day conference. People come together for an intensive, collective focus. There are, inevitably, rivalries, jealousies, flatteries, attractions, and the scenarios of ‘attraction – courting – consummation – divorce’. Although I am caricaturing the closed short-term group setting, you need to ‘hold in mind’ that folk may be going through powerful internal experiences that are not always tangible or visible. However, once you begin to think about these, you’ll inevitably be able to make much more sense of group members’ actions and reactions, whether musical, personal, individual or collective.

3.7b The open group Whether in a residential, familiar or community setting, the open group means that people come and go as they will, and there are no expectations from you with regards to attendance. You may have totally different people each week, or you may have a mixture of ‘old’ and ‘new’ faces. Open groups work well in both long- and short-term contexts, whether hospitals, schools, prisons, colleges or community centres, but you need to be clear about what you offer, and what can be achieved. The important thing, also, is that you are there each week, at the same time and in the same place, doing the ‘same’ thing. This enables people to ‘hold the group in mind’, so to speak, even when not attending the session. In long-term residential settings (such as a prison or a hospice), open groups are an option, since people can feel that they have a choice as to whether or not to attend without feeling guilty, and without arousing disapproval or resentment in those who do choose to attend.

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At the same time, though, do remember to invite people to sessions. A gentle invitation each time may be decisive in folk deciding to attend. They may like to feel invited (and enjoy refusing your invitation), although you need to be careful not to tacitly or unconsciously coerce folk into coming. I’ve found it useful, at the beginning of open-group sessions to check whether anyone present knows of anyone else who might like to come – and then suggesting that someone from the group might like to do a quick invitation. Open groups can be hard work. They can feel like starting anew each time, even though the context is the same and some of the members attend regularly and become familiar with one another and with you. Think carefully before you undertake to do an open group, and think about the nature of your task before deciding on whether or not an open group is realistic. If you are preparing for a performance, then (unless this is an ‘in-house’ event and anyone is welcome to participate) open groups are not a great idea. In contrast, if you are providing weekly improvisation groups or sing-a-longs, open groups may well be essential to ensure that anyone and everyone, at some time or other, can ‘drop in’ and enjoy themselves.

3.7c The semi-open group Here there is a core membership, as well as a fluctuating one: i.e. some new folk arrive for a few sessions and then leave, some return after an absence, some are one-off attendances, others attend erratically and so on. At the same time the core group attends regularly. Your sessions are regular and ongoing – say a weekly group – but participation in the weekly sessions is ‘optional’ or voluntary. In certain instances – such as in medical or hospice settings – this is a useful format, since patients may have periods of feeling unwell and being unable to attend sessions, while others may appear every week, or once or twice a month. Again, think about your group tasks! If you’re preparing for a performance, then choose music that is familiar to most folk, so that the ‘core’ group can prepare the more demanding parts and provide musical stability, while the ‘visitors’ can be part of the more popular/less demanding parts. You also need to be careful of musical or group rivalries – the core group may feel rather resentful if the ‘visitors’ seem to be getting a bit more of the limelight than the core group feel they deserve. Incidentally, ‘scratch’ concert performances of Handel’s Messiah can be thought of as semi-open, one-off groups: with the core group being the soloists and orchestra, and the audience being the ‘visitors’. Similarly with preparations for conventional concert performances where the orchestra

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and choir are the ‘core group’ and, at the last two rehearsals, the soloists arrive – and naturally take the limelight!

3.8 Re-grouping This chapter has considered the issues of group membership and different kinds of groups. Implicit in this has been that, to some extent, the kind of group you run depends on your employer’s brief, the aims and tasks of the group, as well as whether or not there is to be an ‘end product’. We’ll consider these aspects of planning for your groups later in Part One. The next chapter addresses the basics about musical instruments, kinds of sounds, and ‘instrumental’ roles in groups.

CHAPTER 4

Instrumental Thinking and Sound Thoughts This chapter is practical and – some might think – pedantic. This vast area of ‘what instrument shall I play/buy/definitely never want to be associated with’ is largely coloured by personal preferences, social, gender and (sub?) cultural identity; the kinds of groups you work with; the places you travel to, the security aspect of transporting instruments; what is available locally, what kind of after-sales service/repairs exist in your area, and so on. The chapter takes you through the nitty-gritty of purchasing, using and swapping musical instruments: thinking about personally owned versus shared or public instruments; their shape, size, colour, sound qualities, building up a basic kit; gender and group roles linked to instruments – and trying out different roles, both instrumental and in terms of physical positioning within the group. In this sense, those of you who work with amateur and professional instrumentalists might find the latter part of the chapter interesting – as, incidentally, will choir/singing group leaders. Those of you who run listening groups may be less interested in parts of this brief chapter – although the section on linking instruments to persons may interest you too.

4.1 Sound advice In Chapter 6, you’ll find a vignette describing the ‘music group facilitator’ arriving for a session carrying a guitar and two bags of instruments. She makes one trip from the car to the ‘music place’. An itinerant employee, she works in four different places each week, none of which has a fixed, locked room or cupboard for her instruments. She’s organized herself in such a way that she can manage to carry all her instruments in one go – and has a free hand to hold an umbrella if need be. Moreover, she does not seem to need physiotherapy to repair shoulder or back stress caused by carrying heavy loads. How does she do it?

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This section considers how you might think about purchasing instruments for your group music work – here I am thinking of shared or group instruments, rather than personal instruments on which you’ll develop specific musical skills. Also, I am assuming that it is your responsibility to purchase instruments, either out of your own pocket, or on behalf of the school/community/institution that employs you. By the way, if you are writing a fundraising proposal, this chapter will help you to plan carefully! Once you’ve got money to spend, it’s best not to buy everything in one go: find out what instruments work when, why and how, and then think about whether you want more of them (or less), or switch colour, timbre, weight or register. Here are some general thoughts about purchasing instruments: •

Price – buy the best you can afford. Here I am not thinking only of money, but finding the right place to purchase instruments. Find out about their after-sales service: do they have an in-house repair workshop; are they friendly and interested in your work (or only in making a sale); do they love music? In my experience, these factors are possibly more important than ‘getting the best deal’ in terms of amount of cash you spend.

•

Don’t compromise on sound quality. Toddlers, young children and in fact, most of us who manage to avoid being terminally deafened by noise pollution, enjoy ‘sounds’. We want instruments that ‘sound nice’! They make us feel better about playing – and about ourselves. Also, if you’re working with folk whose physical condition means that they use an enormous amount of physical effort to produce a sound (think of someone who’s had a stroke, or who suffers from cerebral palsy) they deserve the best sound possible when their beater finally makes contact with the cymbal, chime bar, cow-bell or whatever.

•

Get instruments that tolerate frequent washing/cleaning, whatever your work context! You need to keep instruments sterile, which can mean several washes a day with a sterilizing liquid. Make sure your instruments can tolerate this.

•

Think about size: large, medium, small, tiny – depending on the size of the people you’re working with. It is offensive for an adult woman to be handed child-size castanets (and vice versa!).

•

Weight is critical and often confused with size: small instruments can be heavy and large ones light. Think about the combination of

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these two factors. Old frail people cannot hold heavy hand drums or bongo drums, neither do they want child-sized instruments just because these are lighter. Look for large lightweight instruments or small weighty ones, as necessary. •

Colour is also a neglected area. Bright colourful instruments are wonderful for young children and toddlers. But can you use the same ones for adults? Having said that, some musicians I know decorate their personal instruments, painting their trumpets, hanging tassels on cellos, and so on.

•

Think about height; whether your groups are sitting on the floor, on small chairs, adult-size chairs, are in bed or standing. Think about the height of your instruments – for example, Djembe drums are played sitting on an adult-size chair. Anyone in bed would struggle to play these, as would someone standing up – unless they’re strong enough to sling it over their shoulders (generally not recommended).

•

Be practical and realistic. Get advice from others (or borrow instruments if you can) before purchasing your own.

•

Finally, if you have to carry your instruments with you, then get a good bag or rucksack that protects instruments from the elements and from hard knocks and bumps (and repels thieves).

•

Keep an inventory of what you own and mark everything! Nail polish and correction fluid work well.

4.2 Instrumental range and sound thinking What to buy and where to start? I strongly recommend building up your kit gradually. How you begin – and what you buy – obviously depends on the needs of your group and the size of your purse. I cannot stress enough that you need to do some homework, to prevent instrumental calamities. For a start, make sure that you have some instruments from each sound, shape, role and ‘skill’ category. Think about instruments in each category of sound. Table 4.1 lists only hand-held instruments, and even here remember that different kinds of beaters for the same instruments give you different kinds of sounds. I don’t pretend to cover all possibilities: rather, this is to get you thinking about the kinds of sounds you need and want.

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Table 4.1 Sounds and instruments Kinds of sounds Short untuned sounds

Kinds of instruments • Hard (wood block + hard-tipped

beater, castanets)

• Medium (hand drum +

medium-tipped beater – felt)

• Soft(er) (hand drum + cotton/wool

tipped beater) bongos, side/snare drums, congas, Djembes (played with hands/hard sticks, snare drum brushes or soft-tipped beaters)

Longer untuned sounds

• Blown (whistles, reed horns,

recorders, pan pipes)

• Scraped (guiros) • Struck and reverberating

(bell/chime bars/triangles/cymbals)

Shaking sounds

• Untuned (maracas, egg shakers) • Resonating (bells, tambourines,

wind-chimes)

Struck tuned sounds

• Single (chime bars) • Multiple (xylophone/metallaphone/

glockenspiel, keyboards)

Plucked/strummed tuned sounds

• Guitar; portable keyboard; autoharp;

Celtic harp

Here are a few other things to think about: •

The spatial qualities of the instruments, and the kind of motor skills needed to play them. For instance, instruments such as xylophones, marimbas, pianos and glockenspiels require the capacity to move from left to right (and cross the mid-line), whereas drums and chime bars only need up-down movements. Plucked instruments require finer motor control, and so on.

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It is helpful to have a good range of beaters: hard-tipped (wooden/hard rubber); medium-tipped (softer rubber/plastic tips); and soft-tipped (cotton or wool). Also make sure you have beaters of different weights and sizes depending on your clientele. Keep them clean and bind them together with a broad elastic-type band and have a light portable jug/large tin in which you can stand them together during sessions.

•

Hiding instruments may be necessary, especially with folk who are easily distracted. When I am working with the very young, my instruments fit inside a plastic red box, which doubles as my seat. This gives the children a clear signal as to when they have access to the instruments – and when they do not.

•

Think about your own valuables: car keys, purse, mobile telephone. I have a small bright bag that slips into one of the holdalls – because of its colour, I always remember ‘seeing it somewhere’. (Obviously, others too can see the brighter objects, so be careful!)

4.3 Making links: People and instruments Studies by psychologists reveal interesting profiles of children’s choice of instruments for learning music, often tied up with personal identity, role models, gender identity, pop stars and so on. Think about who is going to play what instrument and what instruments you are using for today’s session. Leave the rest out of sight. Bear in mind that some may have strong feelings about what instruments they want – and do not want – to play in sessions. Drums or guitars may feel powerful and ‘virile’, while playing the triangle may feel wimpish to some. To others, the triangle or cymbal may be the perfect instrument: not requiring too much effort, while having the potential to be prominent in group musicmaking. Let’s think through linking people and their instruments: •

Rather like people, some instruments are noisier than others. Think about who might find a noisy instrument distressing or over-stimulating; and who might find a quiet instrument difficult – because of the effort they have to put into playing, or because they need to make a noisier sound.

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•

Levels of motor activity. Someone who has poor impulse control and moves constantly needs an instrument that is not going to wind up their neighbours because of constant clanking or blowing. Give them soft-tipped beaters for a start!

•

Size, weight, colour – as discussed earlier, be sensitive about whether a particular instrument really suits that person’s age, stage, size and so on.

•

How many instruments does your planned activity need? If there are five people in your group and only three instruments in the activity you have planned, how are you going to decide who plays and who does not? Will you double up certain instruments so that each person plays? (You may need to rethink your kit.)

•

How you distribute instruments. Most of us appreciate being given a choice rather than having instruments handed out to us. Inviting folk to choose an instrument can be an important part of the session.

•

Who holds the instruments. If children are hyperactive, is it a good idea to hand them all parts of the instrument? Think about whether you or one of your helpers need to hold a part of the instrument, e.g. the beater or the triangle but not both.

•

When to distribute instruments. Handing out instruments at the beginning of the session spells trouble, unless you are using them straight away. Keep them in the bag or aside, get them out when you need them – and put them away afterwards.

•

Think about the role that each instrument takes: supporting, holding the group together (like a bass drum giving a steady beat); a ‘solo’ or more prominent role (e.g. a melodic instrument); or a ‘punctuating’ role (like a cymbal crash at the end of certain phrases). This may help you decide who plays what instrument, according to their personality – and how they need to be challenged!

•

Keep track of who plays what each week. You’ll find that some develop an affinity or aversion for certain kinds of instruments. On the other hand, the affinity/aversion may be for the role that the instrument suggests rather than how it sounds.

These ideas seem basic, but if you don’t think about them beforehand your session can be chaotic. If you do think about them before your sessions, folk in your group will feel known and acknowledged by your thoughtfulness.

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4.4 Making instruments I feel hesitant to write too much here, since I have always been impractical, and rather impatient with making instruments, preferring to get on and play music. However! In contexts where purchasing instruments is not an option at all (for those of us who live in the so-called developing world), then making instruments out of scrap material may be a necessity. Also, making instruments out of scrap materials can make the more privileged (and impatient) of us try out different kinds of sounds, shapes and sizes to those we are used to playing – and can be a welcome change from the run-of-the-mill musical instruments used to ‘make music’. If you have access to a community artist, art therapist or sympathetic art teacher, you’ll get practical ideas as to decorating instruments so that they become a personal statement, imbued with all kinds of personal and collective meanings to do, also, with the time and place of the ‘making’. Try it – my limited experience is that most people need no guidance – they get on and do it, as long as you give them ideas about the kinds of sounds that can be produced, and get them to think about what kind of sound they would like their instrument to make. Generally, you’ll need to ask the group to bring scrap materials such as yoghurt cartons, soft-drink bottle tops, empty tin cans, rubber piping, glad-wrap (cling film), soft wire, pulses (or rice or small stones). You need to provide wood or all-purpose glue, string, staplers, soft wire, ribbons, glitter, paint and scissors to get folk going. Vignette 4a As part of our Community Arts group, we have planned an instrument-making session. I feel incompetent and impractical. Hayley, my art therapy colleague,suggests I put aside my anxieties and simply walk around and observe what (adult) folk are doing. For an hour the art room resonates with sawing, hammering, cutting, and then smells of glue and paint begin to infuse the air.There is an intense feeling of focus and working, with only curt bits of talking such as ‘pass me the scissors’, ‘who’s got the glue?’, and so on. After the tea-break we assemble in the large room – each person with their beautifully made and decorated instrument. I suggest that we walk around with eyes semi-closed (i.e.looking at the floor rather than around the room), each playing our instrument, until we find another sound that resembles ours. The room fills with magical soft hues and colours, quite ‘other’ to the less ambiguous sounds of musical instruments.

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Eventually there are small clusters of sounds dotted around the room, with one person unable to move since her sound sculpture is a tray of sand with different bottles filled with water, which she is gently tapping, and also blowing across. Together with Kirsten, the drama therapist, I walk around, and, starting with the softest sounds, lead folk in such a way as to create a ‘spiral’, both of sound and of shape, in the large room, with the centre point being the sand-bottle sculpture. As folk are led through the room to form the spiral, there is a vast, quiet silence and space in the room, with the sounds moving towards the sculpture. Eventually the room is re-sounded and re-created with the spiral. Kirsten and I then begin at the tail end of the spiral, removing one person after the other, and silencing them: gradually the vast sound sculpture begins to change, as instruments are withdrawn, until only the glass-bottle blowing sounds remain, eventually merging with the still silence. There was something about the distinctive nature of the sounds and their personal significance for each person, that resulted in great delicacy of sound-making. I am not wholly convinced that off-the-shelf instruments would have had the same effect.

4.5 Personal property Even where we don’t make our own, the experience of owning and possessing an instrument and spending time with it each day results in a sense of intimacy as well as protectiveness: towards the instrument and our relationship with that instrument. Playing our trumpet, piano or cello or singing (!) each day for hours on end is part of our personal and musical identity. For a start, our bodies spend time in a particular position, guided by the needs of the instrument and the music, which result in some physical distinctions: the violinist’s jaw mark, the guitarist’s hardened fingertips, the trumpet player’s hand muscles, the singer and pianist’s comportement, and so on. These become part of how we experience ourselves in space. Now think of the instrument that you play (including your voice): what does it do to your own sense of ‘who you are’? There is something, for me, about pianists who can launch into Brahms and Tchaikowsky that I envy: I imagine them to have a sense of power, rather different to my own rather wimpish penchant for Mozart and Haydn in my pianist days (long long ago).

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Now imagine letting someone else play your instrument. Your flute (what about their oral hygiene?); your viola (how clean are their finger nails, how clumsy are they generally?); your beloved guitar (what if they bash it or break a string?); your piano (have they got greasy hands?). Imagine yourself playing another instrument. Which other instrument would you choose and why? (And what kind of music would you play with each of the instruments you imagine yourself playing?) Where all this is leading to, is that to exchange instruments can give us another sense of ourselves and our roles altogether. In your group work, where you’re wanting to do group improvisations with instrumentalists, various possibilities emerge. If you’re wanting to extend players’ notions of what their instruments can do musically (here I am thinking especially of classical musicians who are notoriously reluctant and unconfident in improvisation), what can help them to loosen up musically is to make the instrument different. This will make them think about the sounds in a different way for a start. You might begin by encouraging them to play their instruments in different ways – using the opposite hand/different techniques/registers/timbres and doing what is not normally associated with their instruments. For instance, get them to use soft-tipped beaters to lightly tap a cello/viola/violin bridge with fingering; or use a violin bow on a guitar or drum and so on. The other issue is more tricky – and this is encouraging people to swap their personal instruments with someone else. This is where a sense of intimacy and possessiveness may creep in. Who would you absolutely not ever want to touch your instrument? (I can think of some.) Perhaps you need to introduce this idea gently, though not apologetically, or folk will sense your own discomfort! Also, you might get them to think for themselves as to which instrument they might like to swop with what – the subtext being that the instrument will be associated with a person that they trust. In a choir, you can get the different vocal parts to sing one another’s parts: how does the music feel? (They can sing it in their own register, by the way, with some interesting resultant sound textures.) Another possibility is to keep instruments but change positions – in a musical ensemble, get folk to swap places; same with your choir: mix your voices and see what happens! How do you relate to folk being in different places – and how do they experience themselves with different neighbours? You also need to be sensitive, in group work, not always to position yourself in the same place!

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4.6 Concluding notes This chapter has ranged from the nitty-gritty and rather practical aspects of group music work, to the more fanciful notions of exchanging roles, instruments, and even making your own. I hope you’ll receive these not just as trendy ideas for their own sake. The point is to free folk from their mental/musical constraints, and get them to imagine group musicking in an extended, richer way! The following chapters in this section zoom back to a wider lens: thinking about the physical, musical, mental and emotional space within which music groups happen and, with the final chapter, how you think, talk, and ‘sell’ what you do.

CHAPTER 5

On Being Formed by Music Much of this chapter is for all group music practitioners: whether you use pre-recorded music in your listening groups, or improvisation or pre-composed music in your musicmaking sessions. Although this book does not provide music or ideas for musical activities, here I consider the kind of music you might use. Again, this is part of the thinking before the session – not a last-minute, haphazard decision. For some kinds of group work (choirconducting or preparing for performances) the music that you prepare is dictated by external factors: the kind of occasion, the music traditionally sung or performed at this time of the year, or for this festival or occasion, and so on. However, even here, or when using pre-composed songs, recorded music or writing/arranging your own music, you need to take all kinds of factors into account. This chapter considers how music impacts on us: by associations with times in our lives; by resembling or portraying moods and feelings that we have and by affecting us directly. There is a considerable literature on music and emotion that addresses these complex issues, and here I touch only on aspects that are relevant to group musicking. This chapter links with Chapters 12 and 16.

5.1 Music and society Music is part of our personal, social and cultural life, and there are times when our musical experience becomes a pivotal moment in our personal and collective lives: in other words, to imagine these moments without music is unthinkable. Conversely, we cannot easily think about certain pieces of music without also thinking about their contexts in our lives. As well as thinking about our personal lives, music also has powerful personal associations to do with our ethnic ancestry, geographical region of origin and of current living, our culture and sub-cultures, world events and so on.

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Vignette 5a I recently heard a live performance, by school-children, of Sting’s ‘Englishman in New York’. I found myself indignant and critical of the performance (which was possibly rather good), and realized that this had to do with my own feeling that this is ‘my’ song, and by singing it, the children had made it into ‘theirs’. This made me realize that the song has powerful associations for me: not only for the time of my life when I got to know that piece of music, but also because its lyrics reflect my own sense of being ‘alien’, and of having a different accent and name from others around me. At the same time, the song helped me to clarify for myself something about the privilege of having lived in many different countries,and the difficulties of being uprooted.All of these were part of my response to the children’s rendition of ‘my’ song.

This vignette suggests that our personal as well as social identity can be reflected and generated by music that we come to know intimately at different times in our lives. These kinds of understandings can be used in thinking about what music we might choose for group sessions, and how individuals and the collective may respond to the choice, in the sense of musical ‘ownership’ and musical and personal/collective feelings of identity. Let’s think through various aspects surrounding musical and personal experience that you need to consider when choosing music for your work. •

Age: there’s nothing less sensitive and more offensive than playing music that is not age-appropriate. I mean using children’s songs with an adult group (even if you’re told that ‘they have a mental age of five – and in any case, what does this mean, for goodness sake?); singing Perry Como love ballads with adolescents; Britney Spears with a group of middle-aged men and so on.

•

Culture: those of us who work in multicultural contexts need to be sensitive to the cultural, social and musical norms. In South Africa, for instance, certain songs that are sung by specific sectors of society at specific times, and one needs to be informed and sensitive when selecting music for sessions. For many cultural groups there may be religious or historical associations (and sensitivities) around certain music. Don’t, therefore, assume that since everyone has chosen to be a part of your choir or musical ensemble, they will all sing/play the

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music with similar attitudes towards that piece of music. The same goes for using instruments: there may be cultural/religious taboos regarding certain instruments and specific members of society such as pre-adolescent girls, widowed women or whatever. Here, although the specific examples are multicultural, even monocultural settings need some sensitivity before ‘launching forth’ into music without reflection. •

Social bonding, social space: music creates social space and generates social bonding – or social alienation! In other words, the creating of social bonding and creating a social space by implication excludes some people. So, while making music together can generate a powerful sense of ‘belonging’, and gives shape, texture, colour to one’s personal experience, equally one’s experience can be of being excluded from the collective social space, because of cultural/historical familiarity or sensitivities. Even if these moments of social bonding or alienation are fleeting, their ‘after shocks’ remain enormously powerful.

•

Music of sub-cultures: inevitably, certain working contexts bring together folk from different sub-cultures. Here, I am thinking of a unit for adolescents, which provides mental health care for youngsters from a diverse social range. Some may favour hip-hop while others find this excruciating, others may be into religious rock, and so on. While adolescent identity especially resonates powerfully with musical genres, you’ll need great astuteness to sift through what music is acceptable to all the group, and how as a group you’ll manage your music in such a way that there is something for everyone.

•

Institutional context: each of the points above applies to the nature of the institution within which you work. For example, if you’re working in a high-security prison, think about the words of the song you’re choosing to sing. (I’m not saying that you should not choose songs about freedom or captivity. Not at all!)

•

Time of year/religious calendar: also useful in terms of selecting music is to be sensitive to the seasons, the time of year in terms of social traditions (e.g. harvest, midwinter, Holy Week, Ramadan, Rosh Hashanah). There is more about this in the next section.

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Some of these points alert us to being aware and sensitive about music’s significance for you and for the group members, and its potential complications – or appositeness – for all in the room. The playing and learning of songs from other cultures can also provide direct insights and emotional timbres to do with that culture and society. In this sense, it may be very important for, say, asylum seekers, refugees or even folk from traditionally hostile cultures to learn one another’s songs, as a way of fostering social tolerance and understanding.

5.2 Working and playing cycles The calendar year is generally punctuated by summer holidays and other holidays, religious or traditional festivals, as well as regional, institutional and community events. These ‘punctuations’ naturally segment the year and can help to structure your group work as well as your choice of music and musical activities. Here are external cycles of different length and social significance that impact on your working cycle. Figure 5.1 shows various concurrent cycles of the working year: your overall, longer-term vision of the group; the yearly (a), termly (b), and weekly (d) cycles. Also, a cycle of certain festivals (c) may need your attention.

(a) Year beginning (b) Term (c) Festivals (d) Weekly groups

Figure 5.1 Overlapping cycles of the working year

End

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These cycles all form a counterpoint to one another, each with its own rhythm, phrasing, dynamic – rather like a fugue! Incidentally, part of your group tasks may involve together thinking through what kind of music to choose, rather than you choosing everything ‘on behalf of ’ the group. Let’s complicate matters further, and pretend that you work at four different places in a week, with different populations (let’s say, adult mentally handicapped; elderly people; toddlers and mums; and young offenders). For each population you’ll need a long-term annual view as well as shorter cycles. At the same time, you happen to have been brushing up on the blues idiom and you want the group to experience its magic. Your careful musical planning is out the window, and you find yourself looking for blues music to play with your group. The ideas below are not set formulae or prescriptions as to how to make your group work more interesting: rather, the idea is to alert you to the complexities – and personal richness – resulting from how you choose music for your groups!

5.3 Owning the music Here I’m thinking about how the music belongs to the group in an emotional sense. In other words, ‘owning’ the music is not so much to do with you as group leader selecting music for sessions but rather with respecting the fact that some people in the choir, class or ensemble may have strong feelings of possessiveness for a particular piece of music, which you need to keep track of in your session notes. This sense of ‘ownership’ – which may be acknowledged collectively in the group – can impact on how the group receives that song/piece of music at any time, and this can in turn depend on the roles and relationships within the group. For example, in a weekly group sing-a-long at a local community hall, Bob may request that the group sings the song, Mr Tambourine Man. The group may well come to know this particular song as ‘Bob’s song’ – even when he is absent from a session. One week, it transpires that Adam is pretty fed up with Bob, and begins complaining when someone suggests that the group sings Mr Tambourine Man. Even if Adam does not refer to the song directly as ‘Bob’s song’, this will have become part of the group culture, so that you need to be alert to Adam’s complaint as having to do with an implicit knowledge and acceptance by the group that this is Bob’s song (rather than a song called Mr Tambourine Man).

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The same goes for hymns that have strong personal associations for, say, a particular section of the school or congregation. In choir practice, there may be unspoken sabotages and lobbyings going on as various hymns are suggested and rehearsed. If you’re alert, you’ll get the picture quickly. For example, in my student years, the university orchestra conductor often chose music that was challenging to the string section, and he seemed to spend an inordinate proportion of time rehearsing the strings. As wind players, we behaved appallingly – constantly muttering about the feeble strings, and being unresponsive and obstructive to the conductor’s attempts at getting us to play as a cohesive entity. We were evidently ‘punishing’ the conductor for choosing what we felt was music that ‘belonged’ to the strings, instead of music that the entire orchestra might ‘own’. This constantly risked spiralling into conflict, since the group was clearly not working cohesively. I eventually left the orchestra out of boredom, and joined a small contemporary music ensemble, where my playing seemed to be more valued – and the music owned by all. What we’ve been touching on in these last two sections is that choosing music for group work can get rather complicated because of social, cultural, historical as well as personal and collective experiences and associations. In some instances, having made a choice for the group you may need to assert yourself as group leader, and insist on ‘seeing through’ the music you have selected. If this is a total disaster, then you need to be flexible (and confident enough!) in realizing that your choices were unwise – for whatever reasons – and do something about this. In the next section, I consider how you might prepare the music that you’ve chosen – and how you might use it in your group work. Here I am thinking of active music-making (rather than music listening), in contexts where you may use improvisational techniques as well as performing pre-composed music. Incidentally, choosing music for listening groups is discussed in some detail in Chapter 12.

5.4 Music and you! Once you’ve made your musical choices, how prepared can you be? Very prepared so that you can be as free and spontaneous as possible and keep the music alive! Here are some ideas for you to ‘play’ with when thinking about how the group will work through some music with you. The ideas are to help you ‘try out’ the music in different ways, to glean its multiple hues – not always obvious at the beginning, as we all know.

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Select contrasting music and activities for your session. Conducting the whole session using music in jolly major keys does not provide an optimal range of musical moods and experiences. Rather like compiling a CD, think about what musical mood and colour you want for the beginning and end of your session – and what you might want in between.

•

Be adventurous – find new music!

•

Be cautious – don’t ‘lose’ your group by only providing new or difficult material: some old favourites are important. Be alert as to when the session needs to change tempo and intensity, and relax into doing an ‘old favourite’.

•

Practise singing or playing musical material in different keys. Not everyone can sing in D major all the time – besides, it is excruciatingly boring to remain in the same key. Practise modulating, singing high, low, medium voiced and so on. You need to be as flexible as possible if you’re to include everyone in the musical activity while you’re providing the music live.

•

Practise your music at different dynamic levels, with different textures, and don’t assume that slow music is quiet or fast music loud.

•

Practise major songs in minor keys and vice versa – listen to the effect these changes have on your experience of songs! Also practise songs in other modes – for example, try a major song in the dorian or mixolydian mode – see how its colour and flavour changes.

•

Practise the musical material at different tempi, and be flexible about making rubatos in the middle of a musical phrase if necessary. For example, if Freddy, who’s confined to a wheelchair and moves very slowly, is going to beat the drum while the rest of you sing Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’, it is no use your charging ahead in a tempo that feels comfortable to you! You need to adapt how you play and sing it in order to fit in with his tempo, and deviations from the pulse as a result of his spasticity, if the music is to have any meaning for him and for the group.

•

If using pre-composed music/songs, then learn them from memory. You cannot conduct a group session, keep an eye on each person (and their instrument), conduct and read the words or the music at

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the same time. You need to know your musical material inside out – whether you’re conducting to recorded music or providing the music live, and whether or not the group is familiar with it. This list is getting awfully long. Let’s take a break from it and think about the music itself: things to do with predictability, familiarity, symmetry and spontaneity.

5.5 How predictable? How spontaneous? How structured? While pieces of music or songs that are familiar carry a degree of comfort, the parallel risk is that these become predictable…repetitive… And before you know it, your group work has lost its ‘zing’. Spontaneity (in life) means doing something unexpected – useful for keeping a group on their musical toes. In any case, if you’re alert, you’ll pick up frequent spontaneous cues from group members, which give you ideas for which way to go in music. Here I tease out spontaneity, predictability and unpredictability, while also considering shifts that are congruent and incongruent with the current musical material. When groups music spontaneously, music tends to be predictable in terms of structure (phrasing, metre, tonality and general musical style), in the sense that if the music provides enough repetition, then it can begin to ‘make sense’ fairly quickly both for listeners and players. Thus, a steady pulse, similar phrase lengths or regular cadential points, may give a feeling of familiarity and inclusivity, since there are enough clues for folk to know what’s coming next. They have a sense of ‘being a part of ’ the group and the session. Incidentally, it is no coincidence that collective social music generally has clear points of stability, whether exaggerated accents on the same beat of the bar; songs with recognizable ‘bits’ that we can sing along to even if we don’t know the whole song (or all the words); or bits in dances that are simpler than others – at regular intervals – so that the more fumble-footed amongst us have a chance to ‘be a part of it’. On the other hand, predictability can be stifling and too prescriptive in terms of group roles – people may begin to ‘chafe’ against it. Here, you – or someone – may need to be spontaneous! Spontaneity refers to your capacity to depart from your plan of action, the musical structure or your mindset, and change direction at any moment. You might need to do this for a ‘non-musical’ purpose, for example, to ‘fit’ with the group energy, or in order to shift the group to a different relational mode. Here, the quality of your spontaneity is crucial! Even when rehearsing or ‘workshopping’ a familiar tune, if you suddenly decide to spontaneously shift the metre + harmony + melody + rhythmic pattern, you risk losing the group. Here, your

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shifts have been too multiple, resulting in ‘incongruency’ in all musical dimensions. You may also, of course, wake them up. You need to think about how much congruence and incongruence – how gradual or sudden your shift, and what aspects you’ll shift. For example, if you decide to try a group improvisation on the melodic ‘theme’ that you’ve been practising, it is best to retain the same pulse but switch from a 2/4 to a 6/8 and then to a 3/4 metre. Then try the new metre together with a minor or modal tonality instead of the major. Then add a different musical style. And so on. The point is: think, and think quickly. And spontaneously. When you return to your ‘original’ melody, the chances are that after this bit of spontaneity, the group will be alert, and more interested and focused on the music’s hidden nuances! The above suggests that you needn’t stick to the music, in the sense that if you’ve selected a pre-composed piece (i.e. structured), you may want to introduce some deviations (or variations) that render the music semi-structured. As in the example above, you may be playing a highly structured piece of music – let’s say a chorus-and-verse structure. This is predictable, everyone knows what’s coming. As the verse comes up, you spontaneously switch key. You’re being slightly unpredictable harmonically, but in fact you’ve not changed the structure of the music; you’ve merely altered the key. However, you may decide, instead, that rather than play through the verse section, different parts of the orchestra are going to improvise freely. Here, you’ve shifted the group into semi-structured playing – not unlike extemporization in Bach’s time. This is not an exercise in all the possible combinations, but an attempt to get you to think about what kind of music you’re going to use in your sessions; how structured you will be; how predictable your music needs to be for the sake of the group members, and so on. In other words, we’ve been touching on how you can use music in order to respond to what the group needs in that moment (e.g. a bit of livening up, confidence in departing from the script). The point about all of this is to keep the group (including you!) on their toes, musically and interpersonally. Try it and see what happens.

5.6 Musical structure (and group systems?) In this last section I consider musical structure – whether as part of pre-composed music or spontaneous improvisations. Especially with the latter, musical structure has a dynamic relational purpose: helping to situate and orientate the players towards one another – and, at times, to propel them towards the same musical moment. Here, you need to ‘know’ where/how the structure is evolving, especially where the group is co-creating a free/sponta-

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neous improvisation, not based on a common theme or musical idea. (The ideas discussed here link with Chapter 14 in Part 3, in which we’ll see how we ‘make sense’ of musical information.) Let’s begin by considering musical structure in a more general sense. Music psychologist John Sloboda (1985) tells us that we assimilate musical structure as part of our development as children as we hear and sing the music of our culture, whether lullabies, nursery rhymes, playground songs, etc. This means that those with no musical training have an ‘intuitive’ – and naturally acquired – sense of musical structure, even if they do not know the name for different kinds of pieces. Music sociologists caution us against making fixed links between musical structure and social structure on the basis of each being dynamic, and society being anything but homogenous. The same principle, I would posit, applies to linking musical structure and group structure, roles and tasks. In other words a musical form that ‘works’ one way in one of your groups, may work quite differently in another. However, different musical structures do call on distinctive responsibilities from members of a group. Like open systems, group members are interconnected, interdependent and adjacent to one another. Here, for example, refrains (like chorus in chorus-and-verse, the A section in rondo form and the themes in themeand-variations) can provide stable and familiar pivots for the group, to which they can ‘return’ collectively – and possibly with relief – after having played spontaneously, less predictably and, for some, rather terrifyingly. In other words, think about why you might use one kind of musical structure over another. Incidentally, in rehearsing or performing pre-composed music (be it choir, class music, ensemble or whatever) remember that the audience, too, is part of the larger system. They might also appreciate ‘rondo form’ type structure, or a ‘chorus-and-verse’ providing familiar and repetitive moments. We all need familiar moments, to feel included in the event! The structure of a piece of music, whether pre-composed or improvised, can give you ideas as to what instrumental arrangements you can make, how each person might have a say and when. Having a grasp of the musical structure also enables you to ‘let go’ and be utterly spontaneous while also keeping track of what you’re doing when being spontaneous – you may suddenly feel that you need to return to your first musical theme: when will you do it, how, and how will you lead up to this return? I consider some fundamental musical structures below.

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Rondo form: A b A c A d A e A f etc Rondo form is very useful for group improvisation work, enabling you to combine a familiar, predictable point of stability (the A sections) with sections (b, c, d, e, f, etc) that are less predictable. Incidentally, even in concerts you’ll note that audiences recognize the ‘A’ section, and perk up. One possibility in group playing is that everyone plays together during the As (and you’ll have to cue them in); while one person improvises ‘solo’ freely (with or without you) during ‘b’. When ‘b’ has finished, you cue in the group to join you with ‘A’, the ‘familiar’ pivot of the music. When ‘A’ is finished, you cue someone else to improvise freely for ‘c’. And so on. This structure can keep everyone on their musical toes, since they need to be ready for the group ‘A’ each time, as well as anticipating their ‘solo’ spot – which need not last too long if the person runs out of steam or confidence. Also, unlike strict rondo form, the improvised sections (b, c, d, etc) can be of varying lengths, metre, tempo etc. •

Verse-and-chorus: A (v1) A (v2) A (v3) etc (chorus + verse 1+ chorus + verse 2 etc) Here, the chorus section remains the same, while the verse sections differ from one another in their words. You can use the same format as that suggested in rondo form, with all playing during the chorus, and one person singing/playing during each of the verses. This structure gives folk an opportunity to ‘shine’ – i.e. have a ‘solo’ spot – and at the same time feel musically ‘safe’ in the sense that the ‘verse’ is pre-structured musically and only the words change: so that if you are playing rather than singing, then the fact that different soloists play different verses is what adds variety. •

Verses only: A1, A2, A3, A4… Rather like some hymns, here is a musical structure that offers the repetition of a set of musical phrases: the music can become familiar quickly. Think about what you can do with this structure. Have you written a specific instrumental arrangement, repeated in each verse, for example? Does everyone play all the time? Think about it! •

Ostinato: Ab/Ac/Ad/Ae/Af… Here the point of stability – A – is concurrent with less predictable music, rather than alternating with it as in rondo form. The implication is that even in spontaneous improvisation, where some folk might be nervous of ‘getting lost’, the group can feel anchored by the A section of the group that ‘holds’ the ground – like the descending and repeated bass-line in the •

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Pachelbel Canon. Thus, one part of the group repeats a rhythmic or melodic phrase (A), which provides a ‘ground’ over which others can improvise freely (b/c/d/e/f), either individually or in small clusters like duets, trios, solos and so on. Here the ostinato (A A A) provides stability, and is unthreatening in the sense that those improvising can play something very similar to the ostinato when it is their turn – in other words, it can provide rhythmic or melodic ideas for the others in the group.

Spontaneous, evolving structure: A…b.c.DEF… (The odd positioning of letters signifies the evolving structure – keep alert as you may need to revert to earlier ‘bits’ in order to offer the group some stability.) Let’s say that someone in your group starts tapping on a woodblock in a half-hearted manner. You’re busy preparing the instruments for the next activity – and at the same time ‘tune in’ to what this person is doing. You decide to respond to them, and begin singing very gently in a way that mirrors their tempo, pulse and rhythmic pattern. Your melody is free flowing, following what the person is doing. At some point, you may sing your opening phrase again, which the person may recognize and beat that bit more firmly when you sing it. After a bit more musical wandering, you sing that phrase again – with acknowledgement from them. And so on. Here, together, very gradually, the two of you are creating your own musical form and structure as you go along. With resulting intimacy and shared adventure! Try it! It works! •

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Theme-and-variations: A, A1, A2, A3, etc

Here you have a ‘theme’ that forms the basis for your activity (A) – it is the anchor in the sense of providing a structure that is familiar. However, you may decide to do some variations on this theme (A1, A2, A3). You need to decide how the variations will work: do you keep the same rhythmic pattern but change the melody? Keep the melody but alter the rhythm or the metre? How will you ensure that everyone recognizes that the ‘variations’ are related to the ‘theme’? •

Binary (AB) or Ternary form (ABA or ABC)

It can be useful in a free improvisation to explain to the group that the improvisation will have two or three sections. We may discuss the quality of each section, for example, section A is loud, slow and large, while section B is light and canters along at a comfortable pace. Once everyone understands the sections, go ahead and play them! I have done this with groups of young-ish children (six and seven-year-olds) as well as with large groups

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of adults. Incidentally, this can be the basis for humorous musical portraits – with each person playing a ‘theme’ in a way that portrays them or their best friend or their parent, you grouping the players according to the qualities of their ‘theme’, and then have an improvisation with each section playing at a time.

No structure: (I don’t know how to represent this graphically.) What I mean here is a free improvisation that unfolds as you improvise together, rather than having a pre-determined structure within which you improvise together as a group. This can be confusing for anyone who’s not used to group improvisations – with the accompanying feelings of terror or exhilaration. Try this if you’re confident that your group can tolerate a ‘free-for-all’. Generally, you’ll note that sooner or later (probably very much sooner) someone will find a structure, to which much of the group will gravitate. This can be as simple as a regular pulse, or a simple repeated rhythmic pattern, which most folk will pick up and use as the basis for their improvisation. It is human nature – we’re not very good at collective free-for-alls. •

5.7 Making links This chapter has homed in on aspects to do with the music itself: how to choose music and on what basis; becoming sensitive to how folk respond to familiar and unfamiliar music; being included and excluded and, finally, getting you to think about musical structure. The next chapter looks at the music space, and how you need to plan what goes into it, what is alongside it and what does not belong near it.

CHAPTER 6

Considering the Music Space This chapter is for everyone, irrespective of whether you work in the same place, with the same people every week, whether your group membership is haphazard, whether you’re doing a one-off group or a short-term music appreciation group. The vignettes describe a music group in a hospital ward, but as you’ll see, the content of the discussions applies across contexts. I consider the multiple aspects of the social space that is any music group, and this sets the scene for most of the discussions in this book.

6.1 The pre-music space Vignette 6a: The ward session. Arriving. I walk onto a paediatric orthopaedic ward in a general hospital for the weekly music session carrying my guitar and a variety of hand percussion instruments in two bags.There are twelve beds in the ward with a floor space in the middle and a television and play area in the corner. My mood is light and cheerful, and my energy feels good. I notice that three beds are occupied by children in some form of traction – they’ll not be able to get out of bed for the session. Another child is sleeping. Two girls of around six are playing cards on the floor,next to the television which is showing an animated cartoon. Two boys of around eight and nine are sitting together on a bed watching television, whilst one child, who was dozing, looks at me and smiles in recognition. I remember him from last week. The others give me a brief glance and continue with their games.Tommy, an ebullient five-year-old,rushes to hug me around the legs, almost knocking me off my feet with his plastered arm.

Let’s consider the different kinds of spaces implied by this brief scenario before beginning the music session. 79

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Physically all the children are in a defined physical space. They have in common the fact that they are hospitalized for a similar (orthopaedic) reason, and are more or less familiar with the daily routine hospital and ward. The children also experience varying degrees of physical pain and changed experiences of their bodies and mobility. Similarly, the children in a class, orchestral musicians or choir members are in a defined physical space. The question then is whether they are all mentally and socially present in the same way.

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Socially the children have been removed from their daily environment of family, friends and schoolmates. The ward has its own social structure and dynamic, with the older children, and those who have been in hospital for longest, likely to be near the top of the social order. Some children may be more gregarious than others, and the age-group clusters and gaps between the various clusters will impact on the nature and fluidity of social interactions. All groups, whether formally constituted or not, have implicit as well as explicit social structures and hierarchies, with nuanced social roles being created that may have little to do with the more overt roles that the group demands. (One of the tenors in your choir may be the dominant male in terms of gender status in the group, while the woman in the last second violin desk is the most threatening to the other women, because she is always impeccably dressed.)

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Mentally the children are of different ages, and at different developmental stages of ‘knowing’ and ‘understanding’ what has happened to them and for how long they are to be in hospital. Depending on their ages and pain levels, they may be in need of entertainment, distraction or stimulation to keep them alert and engaged with their environment. Although in more homogeneous contexts these developmental or cognitive differences may not be present, don’t assume that because you’re all (apparently able to be) doing the same thing at the same time, you are all in the same mental space. The same goes for emotional states and feelings.

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Emotionally the ward is tinged with a range of feelings: there may be various levels of distress at being hospitalized and separated from familiar environments; some feelings of being ‘special’ associated with the families’ concerns and interest – which the children may

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not experience in everyday life; anxieties about painful procedures; apprehensions (tinged with pleasure) about returning to home environments; and feelings of numbness and despair at being left in hospital, anger at being abandoned, especially at night, and so on. There may also be anxieties about the social dynamics on the ward: a child may cry incessantly and upset the others; an older boy may be constantly rushing around and taking up most of the ward staff’s energy; while two eight-year-olds have formed an exclusive friendship that marginalizes almost everyone else on the ward. Even in these brief and rather superficial considerations, we have a sense of the complexities of the pre-music space. In this instance, this is complicated by different ages, developmental stages, physical and mental capacities, different levels of mobility and, critically, the fluidity of the ward population. Some children are familiar with the music group session because of their longer stay in hospital, three are new, one child was here last week, and so on. Clearly there are various sub-groups within this collection of young persons – should we take any of these into consideration or ignore the lot, get the children together and hope that they will all ‘sort themselves out’? Let’s continue thinking about the music space and see what happens with our session. (And you continue to transpose this scenario into your own work context.) Vignette 6b: Who’s coming to music? I find an uncluttered space in the middle of the ward,within everyone’s view,and put my instruments on the floor.I find a few chairs in the play corner which I arrange in a circle around the instruments. These are still in their bags/cases. I know from experience to leave them out of sight until everyone is assembled. While doing this I am ‘tuning in’ to the collective energy on the ward. Today it is fairly low-key except for young Tommy who is still rushing around.As I put the chairs together I notice that two of the children in traction are watching closely, another two are walking towards the chairs and sit down.Tommy runs to the card players to tell them that ‘the music lady’ is here – and is ignored. The children watching television are glued to the animated cartoons, and I see that the programme is ending, with the titles beginning to appear on the screen. I walk to the television and inform

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the children that this programme is ending, it is music time so I’m going to switch the television off during session time. They look at me with glazed television eyes for a while, but as I return to the ‘music space’ I notice one watching me and he begins to move as though to get off the bed. ‘You coming?’ I ask. He looks at his friend and then nods. The two of them hobble to the chairs – which are too small for them. I quickly walk to the nurses’ station and ask for two adult chairs: I don’t want to waste time and risk losing their decision to take part. Finally, there are five children with me in the circle, and I look around, checking who may still want to, or be able to join in the session.I make a note of the two children in traction who are alert and ‘present’, even though they cannot leave their beds. The sleeping child is not remotely awake. I begin the session. All this detail! Is it really necessary, you may be asking yourself, it all seems so obvious, and what has it to do with the music space – and with the music session? The devil is in the detail, is my reply, as is the sublime. Let’s think in terms of ‘tuning in’.

6.2 Tuning in to spaces Unless you tune in very finely to all aspects of the physical space from the moment you enter the ward, classroom, concert stage, community centre or rehearsal room, you’ll miss the fine nuances that make people feel that group musicking is ‘special’. And besides, I’d like to challenge the last sentence in the vignette: ‘I begin the session’. The truth is that the ‘session’ begins the moment that you begin thinking about your session as you’re walking towards the music space. Tuning in is not only a musical or a psychological phenomenon. Tuning in needs to happen with all of our senses, all the time. What do I mean by this rather overused phrase? I mean using the whole of ourselves as an instrument to sense and to make sense of (not in an intellectual or theoretical way) how the music space in the ward is at that moment. This is a musical and a bodily, as well as a mental, tuning in. Here we need to begin thinking about music in a broader way: the qualities of loudness, quietness, liveliness, gentleness, flatness, smoothness, suddenness, dispersed-ness, hardness and so on, are qualities that as musicians, we know well. We also know them as human beings. These qualities tell us something

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about the state of the children – not just their mood-states or their physical states, but the whole of them, both as individuals and as a collection of persons sharing time and space in that moment. And you of course. What mood are you in? What is you energy level today? How is your body feeling? Loud, fast, smooth – or loud, fast, fragmented – quiet, fast, hard and so on. Are you mentally alert, or is it that after-lunch lethargic time? Are you irritable and slightly rushed – you couldn’t find parking and you’re running late…? As I said earlier, tuning in does not just happen when the session begins, but needs to begin as soon as you start to think about the session. Tune in to how you are feeling in yourself today, how you feel about the hospital, the nurses (one of them was rather offhand last week), the children (Tommy annoyed you with his loudness last time)… As you enter the building, continue to tune in to the energy of the day, the place, and as you’re on the ward, arranging the chairs, you need to monitor constantly who’s doing what and how. The how is critical for, as music therapists, we are trained to ‘read’ and to work with the very elements that have to do with ‘quality’ of acts and moods and general states. This understanding has been greatly helped by the concept of ‘vitality affects’, developed by Daniel Stern, discussed briefly below.

6.3 How vital is the music space? Psychologist Daniel Stern (1985) has enhanced music therapists’ thinking about the underlying qualities that exist within us, in music, and also in our physical environment. Stern talks about vitality affects which are essential qualities of what we might explain as energy and movement, present in living things – including ourselves and including music. Think of the quality of energy in a concert hall filled with people: there’s a sense of expectancy, a rustle of excitement, a frisson. Unthinkingly, you feel this and ‘know’ the feeling – or rather, the quality of feeling. But how is it that you ‘know’ it? Think about it for a moment. Stern explains this in terms of the ‘unity’ of the senses – drawing from Aristotle’s idea of sensory correspondence: in other words, we experience the same quality across various senses. Critically, we have, from birth, these ‘knowings’ (not to be confused with knowledge as in ‘information’ or ‘cognitive knowing’) to do with time, intensity, shape or contour, and duration. For example, think of time, or tempo: quick, quickening, slow, slowing. These qualities are present in a smile, a movement or walk, in music, in our emotional feelings and in the branches of a tree being moved by the wind. Think of the quality of intensity: like ‘time’, intensity can fluctuate constantly. Think of the build-up of intensity in the weather before a storm;

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think of the varying intensity in a child’s cry, the build-up of musical energy intensity in a Tchaikowsky symphony – and now, finally, the intensity of the cyclists on the Tour de France, all bunched together on their way to the finish line. The ‘intensity’ is a quality common to all – and also common to feelings within ourselves. It is these qualities – of smoothness, bursting, of rhythmicity or flow, and arrhythmicity or non-flow, of smoothness of shape, or spiky energy – that constitute vitality affects. Critically for musicians, these can be portrayed in music. And it is here that the notion of tuning in is critical, since what you manage to tune in to, in the music space, will inform how you begin your session, musically. By tuning in to the qualities of energy, intensity, shape, tempo, in all aspects of the moment – ourselves, the hospital, the day, the ward, the nurses, the children – we know how to play the music in the session. The music needs to reflect these qualities: the tempo and dynamic level of the ward (or classroom or ensemble), the quality of shifts from slow to fast or soft to loud. (Are there sudden bursts of loud laughter? Is there an overall slow quiet heavy murmuring? Is there a silence that feels flat and devoid of momentum?) Tune in – listen to the ‘feel’ of the room before you begin, and also listen to your listening: if the room feels flat and devoid of energy, you may need to begin singing and playing in a way that reflects those very qualities. Sing slowly, quietly, and with an intensity that reflects that in the room. For a start. As is becoming clear by now, the dynamic qualities that you glean and sense as you’re setting up the music space will help the transition from the ‘pre-music’ to the ‘music’ space and time to be smooth; one that does not jar with how the space ‘feels’ when you arrive. At the same time, as you begin with music, you need to listen to how the group ‘tunes in’ to the way that you are playing, this will inform whether – and how – you might begin to shift towards a different quality of musical energy (e.g. very gradually subdividing the beat, to give a feeling of momentum while sustaining the quietness), or remain right where the group is, with the same quality of energy. The magic of music is that it is highly flexible: you do not need to play loud and fast – the same piece of music can be sung quietly and slowly, when necessary. Similarly in your choir practice, or your music listening group, begin with music that ‘feels’ right for the group and the space in that moment. This will make for a smooth beginning, and offer the group a sense of being ‘acknowledged’ – in other words, they will have a sense that you ‘know’ them in an essential way (rather than know about them).

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6.4 Limits of time, place and person By setting up chairs and instruments in a specific part of the ward, you’re announcing that the music event is going to happen within a physical space: the music space. However, some children are unable to be part of that physical space (they are in traction), but are – or become – a part of the mental musical space, for of course, music and sonority are not confined to a circle of persons. In this instance, the music space is not a private one, although it is clearly delineated physically. It is transparent and permeable – seen and heard by others around the ward whom you both include and exclude by the circle of chairs. Perhaps, you can begin thinking of the music space as a physical entity as well as a temporal one: punctuated as an event that begins and ends with a clear – and tuned-in – signal, which is the music itself. We’re also beginning to see that who is ‘in’ and ‘out’ of the music space is complex since this is a physical as well as mental, musical and social space. Some children are able to be physically present in the circle, some are absent but mentally present and engaged and others seem to be disinterested, mentally absent and clearly not group members. Who is part of each of these possibilities may shift during the session, and we need to be alert and manage this fluctuating membership – and the permeable space. Also, since in this particular context the number of children is unpredictable – depending on who’s in the ward and who’s been admitted/discharged each week – the space will be made up of an open or a semi-open group although some core members have been here for a few weeks and know the structure of the session: its length, frequency, some of the music, the instrumental activities, and they know you. Others are new, and curious about what’s to come. Both of these have to be managed – the core members need to be kept engaged, while new members need to feel included, while unfamiliar with the session, the activities, and with the nature of the event. Implied in all of this, of course, is the issue of the institution external to your music space, and also the issue of sub-groups. Since a hospital ward is not like a classroom (where the children are more or less the same age and stage of development), we need to consider two kinds of sub-groups: those that are pre-determined by age, condition, physical position (in bed and engaged; physically in the music circle; tearing around the room but ‘part of ’ at the same time; etc); and the sub-groups that emerge during the session. The latter, here, has to do with the interactive dynamics during the session – and will emerge and fluctuate throughout. We’re in the territory of group dynamics: that which is invisible and powerful, and needs your constant alertness. (We’ve already

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touched on group dynamics and group process in Chapter 3, and there will be more in Chapter 18.)

6.5 Final thoughts To conclude this chapter, it is becoming obvious that we cannot separate the notion of the music space (and sub-spaces) from the people who, by being a part of the music group, create and define both what is inside and outside the music space. Also, there is a clear – and subtle – distinction between what you can see within the space, as group leader, and what is invisible: that which happens inside people’s minds. Even where your group is homogeneous: for example, adults assembled because they all have good singing voices and are part of your choir, or children of the same age in a classroom, remember that the music space remains dynamic, complex and incredibly rich in potential to generate special experiences for all within it. The last chapter in Part One of the book returns to the external workings of your music session: how to think about the nature of your aims, your brief, your role, and how to explain all of this to those who are part of the external scaffolding of the music space: your line manager, head teacher, parish priest or potential funder.

CHAPTER 7

Aims, Tasks, Roles and the Outer Track We all need rigorous ways of describing what we do in group musicking. In these times of accountability, auditing and funding proposals, it is often not enough to ‘do’ what we do. In this sense, this chapter is for everyone, whether or not the content of your work is dictated by the National Curriculum, institutional demands, an idiosyncratic line manager, or…with no external dictates. You and your group might ‘know’ that your work is meaningful and important – but are you really sure that you know how to explain it…to someone who is not a musician? This chapter has links with various chapters in this book, and also has a sub-text: that knowing how to talk about aims, tasks, roles and skills does not replace ‘good work’, some of which is very difficult to describe. This chapter gives voice to the outer and inner track of group music work.

7.1 Roles Since you are responsible for the group’s musical experience, we need to think about how you, as group leader, make this experience happen. An overall description of your roles includes providing for the group in terms of a physical space, the session times, the music you learn/improvise/listen to; providing instruments at times, as well as providing for the musical and social experience. You negotiate the group norms, keep track of group ‘progress’ or ‘developments’; you monitor the overall quality and level of group and individual ‘energy’ levels; and you also ensure and facilitate optimal group functioning. Your musical and personal support and acknowledgement also offers members self-confidence and enjoyment, musical skills and a collective musical and personal experience. Your role is also to listen from a particular stance, and to signal to the group your intentions, requests and demands: whether these be for them to listen, to play, to stop playing, to change what they are doing and so on. 87

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Each of your signals has degrees of energy and clarity: at times a quick look will do, while at others, your entire body signals what you want. Let’s very briefly consider different kinds of musical signals that are a part of your role. There are musical conventions to do with signalling, which range from highly stylized and conventional signs that musicians know (like conducting a four-beat bar, or putting your index finger to your lips to signal softer dynamic levels), to signalling in less stylized ways that you and the group negotiate as you make music together. •

Leading is rather like taking someone by the hand: showing them directly when and how to do something. Here you may be in a modelling role, showing, doing and looking out for how the person responds to your signal.

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Cueing can be thought of as less overt and possibly more ‘personal’ – you may need to discuss with the group how you will cue them, or how they would like you to cue them. Also, all of you may be playing together, and you may need to cue while playing yourself, giving them a signal which is quieter than conducting.

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Guiding is rather like leading except that here you may be waiting in the wings, so to speak, and intervening when the person loses track of or gets lost in their playing or singing.

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Conducting is an overt, usually fairly conventional signalling, and here the conductor is in control: you give a signal that directs a person to do something – rather like an orchestral conductor.

(Incidentally, don’t for a minute assume that you as group leader are the one who does all the conducting or directing. Children especially love conducting – and this can be part of a musical exercise, with different children having a turn at getting others to play, stop, speed up and so on. Also, as in our university orchestra, there may be others in your group who would like to ‘try’ your role: in fact, they may be the ones who subvert your position and, if you’re not awake, may be running the group, rather than you. Give them a turn, and see how it goes.) What’s clear from this very brief – and by no means comprehensive – incursion into your various roles as group music worker, music therapist or facilitator, is that these are multifaceted. Their complexity increases exponentially the more group work you do, and the longer you work with a group! Also, roles shift constantly – sometimes we remain stuck in one role, sometimes we are

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different things to different group members all at once, at other times we seem to fluctuate constantly between roles. In the work with the children on the orthopaedic ward, your role as the group musician is to monitor not just the musical activities, but how these emerge and develop, how each child participates or not, the quality of their engagement, co-operation, awareness of others, responsiveness to one another and so on. As important is to be aware of what is not happening in the group. You also need to monitor how you experience the group as a whole, the individuals within the group and the various relationships within the musical event. Here we’re approaching some of your tasks: in other words, the ‘work’ that you do ‘inside’ the group. These are less public than your role, and the group may not be aware that this is part of the work that you do.

7.2 Your tasks Here are some suggestions as to how you might describe your tasks, in whatever group context. (Think of your own working context as you read through these.) •

To enable – individual and collective creativity to emerge; to foster musical and human relationships.

•

To allow – for richness, individuality, community, for music to sound!

•

To monitor – what is happening at any given moment and all the time, in music, within persons and between them.

•

To guide – and support – this is rather different from directing or prescribing what happens! Guiding means being attentive to the moment, and accompanying persons in music, in their personal and collective group experience.

•

To facilitate – not only in the sense of ‘making easier’ or smoother – but at times to make a very simple ‘intervention’ in order to help the music or the group event to shift in whichever way it needs to. Facilitating may also mean managing conflict or allowing discord to be ‘sounded’.

•

To lead – yes, at times you do need to be the leader! From the front! Providing music, setting the tempo, rhythm, melody and then somehow gathering the group at the same time – so that in leading you are not miles ahead of everyone else.

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To follow – this means allowing (even in subtle, nonverbalized ways) for others to try out roles of leading, initiating musical activities, and taking cues from them.

•

To sustain – when the group music is flowing, you may be needed every now and then to sustain the energy in order to continue the momentum.

•

To end – at times groups are not moving towards ending, either within the music/improvisation, or in terms of allowing the session or your work together to end. You need to be alert, and monitor how and when ‘the end’ will begin to happen. Just as in a piece of music we begin to hear the ‘ending’ a while before it comes, you need to listen to the group’s readiness to ‘end’. You may also need courage in order to bring a group session to an end. Ending a period of intensive work with a group over several weeks or months may need considerable sensitivity, especially in terms of the relationships and bonding between group members, and between them and you!

•

To hold – Your presence can be one that creates and sustains a sense of rich collective musicking with its accompanying feelings and personal experiences. Music therapists speak of ‘holding’ the group and group space: allowing experiences to be felt in a way that feels ‘safe’ for the group. One way to create feelings of emotional and relational ‘safety’ is, as we saw earlier in Chapter 3, through negotiating and respecting group norms.

In thinking about these internal tasks, we can also use other vocabulary, such as: •

witnessing – being present and attentive to the moment, and sharing in it with others

•

intervening – using our expertise in the best possible way and with clear intent

•

changing – where an activity or music does not feel right, then change it!

•

listening – the most important of all. Listening with focus, commitment, openness and attentiveness.

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Divertimento: The inner track I want to divert briefly from ‘describing’, for a moment. What is clear, in reading these descriptions of your role, is that these descriptions assume your own total commitment to being in music, to making music, to generating and receiving musical energy, and to flowing with the group momentum while also monitoring and reflecting on it constantly. Without your absolute commitment, your work risks remaining half-hearted and mediocre.

Let’s now return to the outer track, and see how you might describe your aims. Here I am thinking of the public face of your group work, and its fit with the discourse of the context in which you work.

7.3 Group aims and briefs: Generally speaking Here I link together the notion of aims and briefs to make a crucial point: in terms of talking about and describing aspects of your work, you need to be clear about the nature of your brief, how this fits with your own skills; what discourse your employers/ institution uses, and how your aims fit with this discourse. (Refresh your memory by re-reading Chapter 1.) We see in Table 7.1 that aims are multifaceted: some are pre-determined by the institution and in this sense, common to other staff members; while other aims have to do with your specific work, where your brief is prescribed by the work context. Both of these are fixed in the sense of being prescribed by your employers. Other aims emerge during sessions and continue evolving, and are specific to your group members; in other words, these are internal to the group – even if they are part of the public discourse. In terms of describing your aims, the list below and Figure 7.1 give you ideas for describing different aims of group music work. In both instances, some of the aims are specifically musical, some interpersonal and some straddle both. In this sense, these are not necessarily ‘mutually exclusive’ distinctions.

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Table 7.1 Multiple aims: The public discourse Institutional brief

Music – specific brief/aims

Group – specific aims

Common to all/many ‘staff ’ or volunteers in institution

Specific to your kind of music group work

Specific to particular group and its members

‘Fixed’ aims

‘Fixed’ aims

Fixed and emerging

To perform at Easter service

Provide, coach and perform music

‘Grow’ community

To prepare for year-end exams

Develop music skills + pass exams

Enhance self-confidence/ group skills

To enhance neuro-rehabilitation

Develop music + neuro/motor skills

Enhance self-esteem + confidence

To develop group social skills

Develop group music + social skills

Address group conflicts

To ‘teach’ Wagner’s Ring

Listen to + critique various recordings

Develop critical thinking

Examples:

Fundamental aims may include the following: •

Addressing needs or problems: e.g. institutional tensions or needs, musical needs, or difficult experiences arising out of socio-economic contexts – here you may be called in to ‘troubleshoot’, do a conflict resolution, community building or offer support.

•

Developing/enhancing/sustaining social or life skills is another way of talking about solving problems or addressing issues. Here your brief may be to help rehabilitate those who have been removed from society, e.g. young offenders, prisoners or persons with brain injuries. All of these may need to ‘re-learn’ certain basic life skills.

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Ensemble rehearsal Cognitive-perceptual The wedding ceilidh Musical

Neurological -motor

Social

Develop/sustain skills

Create community

Music performance Religious ritual

Repair/address/ prevent problems

Generate social identity Class teaching

Relational-emotional Music therapy group Institutional

Figure 7.1 Aims, work contexts and discourses

•

Developing/enhancing/sustaining cognitive skills (e.g. memory, attention-span and focus) through developing and extending musical activities.

•

Developing/enhancing/sustaining listening skills, musical, verbal and non-verbal – in rhythm, melodic contour, phrasing, dynamic levels, timbre and also the prosody of spoken language.

•

Developing/enhancing/sustaining music and communication skills to do with, for example, anticipating, responding to, extending and initiating musical utterances and events.

•

Another useful way to think about your aims is to think in terms of primary and secondary aims. Here, once again, I stress that you need to be clear about the limits of your skills and the focus of your work. Table 7.2 suggests that although the locus of your work is in the

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area of your primary aims, there are ‘spin-offs’ or tangential effects of your group work. These I call secondary in the sense that they may be hidden: they may not be words that you necessarily use to portray your work, but rather, these help you to remain alert to the function of the group as a whole. Table 7.2 Primary and secondary aims – and professional overlaps Primary aims Music therapy

Secondary aims

To explore emotional/relational issues

To create group/social bonding

To repair damage

To enhance feeling of belonging

To address conflict/trauma/illness/issues To prevent deterioration/illness

To enhance music skills To enhance self-esteem/confidence

To develop social/cognitive/speech/ group skills etc) To enhance creativity/self-expression To sustain health

Music education

To develop music/social /group skills etc

To enhance cognition/co-ordination

To enhance creativity/self-expression

To enhance self-esteem/confidence

To play music To develop group music skills

Community music

To play music To develop group music skills To enhance creativity To create community

To address social fragmentation To prevent conflict To develop group skills

To invite community musicking To enhance social identity

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Your institutional context as well as professional discipline helps you to define your work, using, for example, medical, religious, social, psychological or educational discourse. At the same time, as we saw in Chapter 1, there are fundamental discourses to do with group musicking, irrespective of your working context. Here is a model for thinking about group musicking in general terms (Figure 7.2). Self-development/ skills

Prevent skills loss/worsening problems

Create community

Musical Social Psychological

‘Repair’/address problems

Sustain community/group bonding/sense of belonging

Create musical/social identity

Figure 7.2 Group musicking If you’re feeling confused, or that I’ve been repeating myself, good! What is clear from the confusion is that there are many ways of thinking about the aims of your work! I’ve purposely not offered a neat formula, since your aims are context bound, and best generated by you in combination of various factors: your work context; your skills; your professional discourse; the group members – and your ‘audience’.

7.4 External aims and briefs Some group briefs are music-based, preparing for specific performances and, here, the group’s life may last only for the period of preparation up to the performance (e.g. a school or college may decide to put on an opera performance, and bring together musicians, singers, costume and set designers, as well as a director/conductor). The aims are explicitly musical.

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Divertimento: The inner track Although the aims of a group may be explicitly musical, this does not mean that there are no interpersonal nuances or group dynamics going on during and after rehearsals, but are they your business? Do your skills include addressing these? And if you are aware of ‘non-musical’ issues, do you remain firmly on the ‘musical’ track? The pre-determined brief is the basis for the group coming together in the first place and, more importantly, will be part of the group’s expectations of group activities and of your role. There are two possible courses of action here: one is to refer any interpersonal issues that sabotage your work and that you are ill-equipped to address to someone whose expertise is in this area; the other is to find a ‘mentor’ skilled in group process who will help you to work out ‘what is going on’ within the group that is making your work so difficult. This should help to clarify how these issues can be addressed without too much disruption in achieving your aims. Conversely, your brief may be interpersonal or psychological rather than musical. Here too, you may find yourself excited by the group’s musical work. What do you do? Do you switch your focus and move towards more explicitly ‘musical’ work; do you ignore the music-making and remain firmly on the ‘psycho’-track? These kinds of dilemmas are part of the paradox that being human and musicking can be indistinguishable from one another. As a musician who may not be trained in psychological work, it is inevitable that your musical sensibilities will kindle and be kindled by sensitivities that are other than just musical. Incidentally, music therapists have similar dilemmas, where improvisations touch our aesthetic sensibilities. How to manage these two can be complex – and enriching – while at the same time, we need to be utterly clear about the limits of our skills, and our aims, briefs and tasks! Any of this is what makes shared musical experience so powerful as a collective human experience, and of course, human experience need not only be ‘psychological’, but may be ‘just human’, in terms of learning about ourselves and experiencing one another through sharing musical experience.

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As we’re seeing in this chapter, group musicking has other nuances and spin-offs, aside from giving people the opportunity to develop music skills, revisit an earlier love for music (which may be profoundly significant socially and personally), meet other people, share life experiences, create history together and so on.

7.5 The inner track I’ve already voiced the inner track in parts of this chapter. Let’s listen to this more closely. Group experiences by their very nature foster interpersonal relationships. Even if, as teachers, community musicians, conductors or church group leaders, you’re not trained to work at an interpersonal level, it will help you to at least think about the existence and power of this less tangible track, since being alert to these nuances may go some way towards addressing them, and you’ll note that your musical and non-musical acts and responses become shaped by your awareness. Music therapists are acutely aware of these internal nuances and have trained antennae, so to speak, to spot, acknowledge and address these with the group where appropriate. Here, any part of the session – e.g. choosing instruments, deciding on activities or songs, playing music, not playing, etc – can give you valuable insights and cues about the individuals, their relationships with one another and with you. Whilst as a ‘non-therapist’ it would be inappropriate (and indeed unethical) to use your (untrained) awareness as the focus of in-depth personal group work, you can invite the group to discuss their experiences of listening and playing, if this fits with the aims of your work and with the group norms that you’ve negotiated together – otherwise you may be transgressing your role and your brief. Incidentally, I would suggest that anyone with human sensitivities and group experience usually picks up these undercurrents and manages to address them quite naturally. The main point of all this discussion is to be aware that undercurrents exist, and to make sense of them – possibly with the help of an external mentor, especially where you are working with people whose personal needs and difficulties render your work more complicated. There is more on undercurrents and overtones in Chapter 18. All of this is good and well – but how on earth do all these ideas help you to ‘describe’ and ‘explain’ your work to others: especially those who may not be altogether sympathetic to your work, and consider music to be a luxury or ‘optional extra’ (to use John Blacking’s words)?

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7.6 How clear are your aims? (and revisiting discourses) If you recall, at the beginning of this chapter I distinguished between aims – as the ‘public face’ of your group work, and ‘tasks’, as the private or ‘inner track’ of your sessions. In terms of publicizing or marketing your work, you need to be able to state what you do, why you do it and how the group members benefit from your work. These are often external, public necessities, and musicians need to think especially carefully about using words to describe and portray their work. In Chapter 2 we considered institutional values, ethos, mission and visions. We’ve seen that each of these ‘feeds’ the institutional discourse, whether it be educational, religious, musical, medical, psychological, correctional or whatever. It is this discourse that informs your marketing strategy! Go back to groundwork if necessary: revisit the institutional discourse, draw from your own professional discourse in a way that makes sense to non-musician colleagues, and then think about formulating your aims. Many of the aims we discussed earlier (and there are many others that you’ll have to think up, to do with your own work) have to do with ‘more than’ music-making. In other words, music is the means to ‘something else’. What this ‘something else’ is – or rather, how we describe it – has largely to do with the context in which we work. For example, in a medical rehabilitation context, we might define our aims as enhancing ‘motor skills’ and ‘life skills’ – although the latter may be used also by prison services or contexts for young offenders. Educational contexts may need us to speak of ‘cognitive’ or ‘learning’ skills, while a music college needs us to ‘develop orchestral skills’ or whatever. And so on. Any of these contexts need to be considered when describing what it is that is expected of you – and how what you do can ‘fit’ with the needs of the context. Theories also offer discourses that help us to understand – and to explain to others – the tasks of our work. The danger here is that if we are too invested in one theoretical discourse and use it unthinkingly, it can become a personal ‘ideology’ that blinkers our listening to what is going on, in the sense that we are invested in whatever happens being made to ‘fit’ with the theories that we have grasped. An example here (to be extreme) would be someone who works only ‘behaviourally’ – in other words, within the framework of behavioural psychology. Unless there is an openness of thinking and vision, this group worker will see everything in terms of stimulus–response or operant or classical conditioning and so on. This is a rather narrow and rigid lens, and certainly this book

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encourages you to think broadly and fluidly. The more discourses you can choose from the better – but you need to be informed about them. I conclude this full chapter with something self-evident: keeping track of what you do (and why you do it). This will help you enormously in terms of describing what has happened in your session, how this impacts on future work – and selling, advertising, marketing, and publicizing your work to potential employers, funders, donors – and colleagues.

7.7 To conclude: Keep track It is absolutely crucial that you keep track of your sessions, lessons or rehearsals! Who was there, who was absent, what you did, how you planned it, how it turned out. Also, in clinical settings you need to keep a record of how each child/person was each session, what you noticed that was unusual – anything you may want to report back to the carers. I find it useful to have a file for each place where I work, and within that file have dividers for each group. Then within these dividers, I have several sheets of paper for each group member, on which I keep track of each session – with dates and times. Generally it is best to make quick summaries after each session, since by the end of your working day you’ll have forgotten what you did and how it went. Be sure to keep copies of any reports you write on a person, and file reports that you receive from your colleagues. I also have a separate section for any music I might have composed that I may want to use again. The golden rule is simple: you need to keep a record of what you do, from week to week. Also, keeping a record of your work will help you to revisit your brief, and the fit between this and what you have actually done. This will help you to renegotiate your contract, revisit your aims, and possibly, even, reconsider your role! Your reports, funding applications and public speaking will be all the richer for your records: especially if you are meticulous about noting unusual aspects of your sessions. This is an apposite conclusion to Part I of this book: Planning: Thinking Ahead. By keeping a consistent record of my own work over years of group work, I have been able to draw from a rich source of information, descriptions, reflections and insights: the basis for this book!

PART II

Executing: ‘Doing’

Part II of this book describes various kinds of groups musicking together in different contexts. Chapter 8 describes ‘Forming Groups and Groups Forming’, implying that groups continue to group and regroup throughout your session. ‘Group Flow, Group Pulse’ (Chapter 9) describes the musical signals that convey how the group is flowing – and not flowing , while Chapter 10, ‘Whose Group? Whose Music?’ considers how we work with the distinctive sub-groups that make up the whole group, as well as the ‘absent’ group outside the music room. ‘Group Rituals’ (Chapter 11) describes the roles that we are called upon to fulfil at times, as musicians, to create or participate in a social ritual, while Chapter 12, ‘Live Meanings’ describes how listening to music generates individual and collective meaning for groups. Chapter 13 describes work with groups, doing team building and conflict resolution. I want to reassert that this book is not a handbook, and does not tell you what to do, what music to use or how to do your musicking . This section of the book, rather, describes various acts of musicking in order to help you think about what can go wrong and why, how we can all learn from spectacular failures, and how we need to be constantly alert and able to change our carefully laid plans, in the interest of optimal group experience.

CHAPTER 8

Forming Groups and Groups Forming Quick Time, Music Time and Sound Deeds

This first chapter in the Executing section of this book uses various group work vignettes to illustrate aspects of group work that affect everyone – whatever their context. Although the vignettes draw from work with children, do not be fooled! One reason why children are useful learning models is because, on the whole, they act their thoughts and feelings overtly, without ‘protecting’ your group facilitator’s feelings or ego. It is their acts that I use here to present some practical strategies for work in all groups, including adult groups. Incidentally, one of the complexities of working with adults is that they are less likely to let you know directly or clearly that your group management is unsatisfactory. They may ‘vote with their feet’ and leave the group, sabotage your work covertly – or be utterly co-operative, with their own vested interests in mind, rather than yours or the group’s.

8.1 On becoming a group In Chapter 6 we looked at beginning a session with children in a hospital ward, and thought about how this loose collection of children would become ‘a group’. This chapter zooms right into music group sessions, and explores the ongoing, fluctuating and highly nuanced shifts in groups, which are generally determined by each person impacting on others. These events may remain unknown – at our peril as group music workers. When rehearsals, music classes or sessions don’t ‘work’, you have a choice: to shrug your shoulders and consider it as part of a ‘bad day’, or to reflect on why and how things were disappointing or catastrophic, and why you’re left feeling exhausted and stressed. Your work will be the richer for these reflections. This chapter introduces some basic group music concepts from music therapy work, in the hope that you will discover that whether or not the group or the music ‘works’, or whether your session is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is not necessarily the most important issue. More sig-

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nificant is whether – and how – the group musical experience can leave each person – including you – the richer for having been a part of the music group. Becoming a group is more than being together in the same space, and together playing or listening to music. For a start, music itself can draw us instantly into the present, even where, paradoxically, a piece of music can suddenly propel us inwards to retrieve a forgotten event in our life. This private act happens in the moment, and within a collective setting. The act of singing or playing together can also be collectively focusing in the moment, which experience can irresistibly impact on our sense of identity: here and now, in this moment, together with others. In this sense group musicking provides deeply personal, private, as well as collective musical and emotional experiences. It is the depth and power of these personal experiences within the collective act that can be powerfully bonding socially as well as musically. After all, we know that folk who undergo a similar experience together – whether a social ritual, a team-building hike up Ben Nevis, or a World Cup football final – experience a powerful sense of being a part of a greater whole. Many of us also know that this power can be enriching and destructive. Musicking, with its irresistible personal and social associations, and its direct capacity to ‘ignite’ our sensibilities, provides each person in the group with the opportunity to experience a primitive, tribal and utterly human feeling of ‘being a group’ – possibly for the first time in their lives. Here we’re touching on the notion of groups forming, with the gerund of the verb ‘to form’ signifying that this is an ongoing event. The group does not ‘form’ and then remain a ‘formed’ group but, rather, continues ‘forming’ for as long as you work together. In addition, the fluctuations of personal experience continue to impact on the various relationships within the group. The notion of various relationships is the other significance of the concept of groups forming: in the sense that it is highly likely that there is more than one group operating at any moment. In a moment we will return to the orthopaedic ward, which we entered in Chapter 6, and see very quickly that during the ward music session, various sub-groups will form, unform and reform, and that in the overt sense, you’ll notice this on the basis of who engages musically and who doesn’t, and also on the quality of their musical (and other) acts. Let’s fast forward and peep into the music session on the ward.

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Vignette 8a: Different ‘games’ Anna, Bennie and David are engaged in an instrumental activity with me – we’re taking turns at beating a hand drum which I hold and move between the three children, so each has a turn to beat. Cherie and Karen are giggling and attempting to elbow one another off their chairs; Ezekiel is ‘day-dreaming’ and gazing out of the window; and Francis tugging at my sleeve urgently. I need to monitor all of these, as well as the fact that Geraldine and Harriet, who are in bed and in traction, watch closely while Anna, Bennie and David play, and sing fairly loudly (loud enough for me to hear) during the chorus of the instrumental activity.

Cherie and Karen, although not participating musically, are not interfering with any of the other children’s participation – although their behaviour riles me somewhat. I monitor my own response and do not necessarily act upon it: by being aware of my annoyance, I become aware that other children may also be annoyed, although none seems to be showing this overtly. However, I realize that Ezekiel’s day-dreaming may be a way of avoiding having to be annoyed with Cherie and Karen, or an anxiety of the conflict that might emerge between Cherie and Karen, on one hand, and Anna, Bennie and David on the other. I need to make quick decisions as to how to address the potential tension – if at all – or whether to allow events to unfold for the time being, since three children are intensely absorbed in playing, and the two bedridden ones in observing and singing. I do not want to interrupt this by shifting my overt attention to others who are mentally absent or less engaged. This tuning in on musical acts, personal thoughts and feelings, and interpersonal events needs to go on constantly while you also remain engaged in music-making as the group leader. The trick is to manage both – since this will enrich your experience of each of the children and in turn enrich their experiences of the session and of themselves. By responding from a space of reflection within yourself, you also invite a different emotional and musical resonance from a child, and this may be a new experience for them, that remains with them after the session. It is often subtle and shifting details that help to clarify what underpins the acts and behaviours of various members (e.g. Cherie and Karen may be making a statement about feeling excluded from the activity – whilst also excluding themselves by their acts).

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Let’s continue with the session, and pretend that during the same instrumental activity, I now want to act on drawing Cherie and Karen into the activity, since my intuition is that the time for doing this might be approaching. Vignette 8b: Music – play I begin to move the angle of my body in such a way as to include Cherie and Karen in my direct (rather than peripheral) line of vision. At this point, Anna and Bennie very subtly lose energy in their drum beating, while Cherie and Karen become quieter, and turn their attention towards David (still intensely focused) and myself. Since I am using a small hand drum, which Anna, Bennie and David were taking turns to beat, I now extend my arm towards Cherie and Karen. Karen giggles, momentarily throwing Cherie off balance: she was beginning to move her arm in response to the hand drum being in front of her.Cherie hesitates a fraction,and in that split second,I move the hand drum back to David, who beats enthusiastically, while I am aware that Karen has stopped giggling, and Cherie is now highly focused towards the hand drum. On the next beat of the song, I move the hand drum further over, towards Karen, who immediately beats it, and then I move it towards Cherie, who beats it too. In order not to exclude Anna and Bennie, whose lower energy I have been monitoring,I move the hand drum to their side of the circle, and then quickly back to Cherie and Karen since I do not want to lose their new-found interest. And so on.

We see here split-second decisions, very quick timing and shifting relationships and changes between the children. We see also how any of these shifts impacts on the musical activity, and on the group as a whole. At the moment, I do not want to comment too much on what each or any of these shifts and regroupings ‘mean’; but rather suggest that it is by being constantly and minutely aware of what is going on within, around and outside the musical ‘acts’, that I am in an informed position to make sound decisions. In this instance, the decision is to include more children in the simple activity, without interrupting the flow of the music. This is the result of having an ‘inner track’ of thinking, that monitors and constantly questions ‘what is going on’ as the group continues to play music. Were I not listening to this inner track, and not aware that something else was going on in the children’s minds, I might have stopped the music, turned to

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Cherie and Karen, and said something like ‘would the two of you prefer to go and read on your bed, you’re disturbing the other children who want to enjoy playing music’. We all recognize ourselves in a comment such as this. Let’s pause to consider its effects. For a start, it polarizes the group into those who ‘do’ and those who don’t ‘do’. Also, it makes it difficult for Cherie and Karen to remain part of the group without losing face, or without having to be even more distracting in order to make their position more solid. This, in turn, might make Anna, Bennie and David feel like they’re being ‘good’, and they may feel uncomfortable with this: for a start, it might make them feel aligned with me, in the sense of being ‘teacher’s pet’. (I use this term not because this parallels a music teaching session, but because this might be the children’s frame of reference.) Group shifts are extraordinarily complex, there are at least as many relationships going on as there are persons in the group. You need to develop a sense that there are ‘other things’ to be aware of while you are ostensibly ‘just playing music’, to help you decide what to ignore, and what needs to be acted upon – and if so, how and, most critically, when. I now shift to another scenario, still with children, and this time from a music therapy setting: the point in this vignette (8c) is that although the music therapists’ acts are informed by clinical thinking, their acts are musical. They do not speak to the children or to one another. Rather, they draw from the potency of that most social and traditional of musical genres – the March – to refocus the group.

8.2 In the mood – musical thinking Vignette 8c Here is a weekly group session with four young children aged around five,and two music therapists,J at the piano,and P on the floor with the children. The children come from a local special school, and I’m watching the session behind the one-way observation mirror. P’s attempts at getting the children to sit on their small chairs are chaotic: Karim reaches out for the drum, Leslie runs around to see what’s on top of the shelf, Cheryl throws herself on the floor and Diana is curled up on the chair sucking her thumb. P grabs hold of Karim and Leslie, and brings them back to their chairs, at which moment Diana leaps up and hides behind the piano.

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J (who is at the piano) begins an emphatic,clear marching song and P immediately strides around the room with exaggerated marching movements. Almost miraculously the four children follow P, more or less marching (or trotting or leaping) behind her. The song is an 8-bar phrase: Marching, Marching, Marching ’Round the Room! Marching March, let’ s all SIT DOWN! – at which point everyone dives for their chair and sits. For a few moments there is stillness, which both P and J hold. As soon as one child begins to twitch, J and P begin the song again. Let’s look at this in some detail. The group is fragmented: the children leap around the room, and no amount of P’s verbal instructions, pleas or requests seems to make the slightest bit of difference to the turbulence in the room. Critically, neither J nor P are unnerved by the chaos: J, at the piano, watches, listens to the quality of chaos – its energy, intensity, contours, phrasing, loudness (in other words, its ‘vitality affects’). J is utterly focused. With perfect timing, J dives into a March at the piano, hardly knowing what she’s doing. However, the March’s energy ‘fits’ the level of energy in the group: the music has the same dynamic level, a slightly sharp, staccato feel, with short phrases, angular contours and a clear musical direction. P recognizes the music’s vitality affects as fitting the vitality affects in the room, and at the same time, trusting J’s clinical-musical thinking, instantly joins her. She hears the word ‘March’, jumps up and begins to stride purposefully round the room. Critically, her movements also have the same vitality affects: they are sharp, angular, loud, intense and energetic. The children, apparently recognizing their own vitality affects both within the piano music, and in P’s movements, miraculously join P’s marching, and, even more miraculously, at the end of the four-bar phrase, when J plays some splendidly sforzando chords and sings ‘SIT DOWN’, everyone does just that. So – what happened here, how did this all magically ‘come together’? (Figure 8.1).

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Fragmentation and Chaos

P attempts to ‘settle’ the group J watches and listens

Silence: no music

P hears the energy of the March and acts J begins March at piano

Children begin marching with P

Everyone sits on the floor – Group Cohesion

The children ‘recognize’ something of themselves in the music and in P’s marching

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P and J share a mental intention about the March and continue playing/marching

Simple, clear melodic line – 4 x 4 bar phrases Energetic and staccato playing – culminates in…

All SIT DOWN!

Figure 8.1 ‘All SIT DOWN!’ J and P don’t wait for the children to calm down, sit still, and first listen to the song and learn the words, ‘let’s all sing it together and then we’ll march around the room’. J and P very quickly intuit that verbal ‘instructions’ will possibly polarize the group into ‘us’ (the therapists who need the children to be more or less still so that they can begin the session) and ‘them’ (the hyperactive special needs children who are a handful, and whose pathology explains their behaviour). Instead, J plunges in, cutting right across P’s attempts to ‘settle’ the group. Her timing and inspiration are superb, with her musical energy fitting that of the group and also ‘containing’ the group chaos: in other words, she does not try and stop the chaos, but goes alongside it, albeit in a structured, interesting, musical way.

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P doesn’t think, ‘What on earth is J doing, can’t she see I am trying to settle the children so that we can start?’, rather, she trusts J’s musical acts, AND jumps up to march around the room. The rest – as they say – is history. What about the music itself ? It begins as a spontaneous improvisation and, as J adds note after note, she focuses intently on the melodic, rhythmic, harmonic content, very quickly building a highly structured piece of music, utterly spontaneously. The March has 16 four-bar phrases, is melodically and harmonically simple and interesting, and the repetition leads to a climax: the loud ‘SIT DOWN!’ at the end of the 16-bar phrase. This, however, is not enough to get the group going. The two therapists themselves ‘do’ the song with total intent and focus. Nothing else matters in the moment. J plays the March as though her life depended on it, and P marches around the room purposefully – and without ‘inviting’ the children to join her. Rather, she expects the children to join in, and through her movements and their joint singing, P and J convey their expectation – and enjoyment – to the children – who jump right into the music. This is the moment when the fragmented collection of individuals becomes a group. This is the moment that the group becomes cohesive. There are no sub-groups in this moment, no divisive alliances, instead the focused group working together. Although informed by clinical thinking – and these are two very experienced music therapists – this group cohesion is achieved directly through the musical acts. To repeat: the music is simple, repetitive, interesting, and provides moments of order – whilst not ignoring the energy level in the room. This is because the quality and level of energy in the room belongs to this particular combination of persons, and to avoid acknowledging it would be artificial – and looking for trouble. Improvisational music therapists read the group’s energy, make sense of it , and can reflect or portray it with unerring accuracy in music that is attractive and compelling. Also, the music has a fluidity and a point of climax and rest – which is fun, and draws the group together. This vignette is an example of what music therapists call clinical/musical intervention: the musical act has clinical intent, which in this instance is to bring the group together. The intent is not simply to have a game of musical chairs or something close to that, nor is it to ‘teach’ the children to sit, stand, march, nor is it to recognize musical climaxes and rests. The intention is for these children, at the very least, to have an experience of ‘order’ and creativity as a group – within the context of who they are. Their hyperactivity and its energy is ‘read’ by the two therapists not as patho-

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logical or as needing remediating, but as having enormous creative potential, and J’s split-second clinical / musical inspiration, as well as P’s clinical thinking and receptiveness to J, shift the children together in the moment. Here is group work in music. It may be informed by verbally based Group Theory, but the therapists are not theorizing whilst they are in the room. Rather, they work directly through music, being highly skilled at using a flexible and dynamically insistent medium to draw the group together. This experience of group cohesiveness, even though momentary, will be discussed by the therapists in their clinical reflections after the session. Here they will also discuss how this experience can be consolidated and extended in future sessions and how, possibly, the March music can be extended or changed, to give the children an optimal group experience at next week’s session. J and P may also spend considerable time discussing the interpersonal meaning of what happened, for each of the children.

8.3 On ‘receiving’ the persons What the vignette above shows is two adults not judging the children’s behaviour, but instead receiving the children as persons with qualities of energy. What is tricky is the whirl of buzzy hyperactivity. We might posit that although, as separate persons, some children may be relatively calmer physically than others in the group, a group situation emerges that results in a chaotic whole. The therapists watch the children’s movements, listen to the sounds the children make, and imbibe or absorb the ‘whole’ of their interwoven qualities of being. Their acts are ‘informed’ by what they receive. As musicians, they can instantly convert this energy information into musical sounds, and enter into music in a highly specific way: specific to this group at this particular moment. It is this specificity that is so compelling: especially where children such as these may be more used to being taken ‘literally’. In other words, a disruptive child in class may be seen to be ‘misbehaving’ in terms of school norms and rules, and teachers act accordingly: attempting to get the child to ‘conform’. This is highly necessary in terms of collective social living! After all, most teachers have an entire class to consider, and have specific tasks to achieve. Their work is to minimize what might interfere with, or prevent, their carrying out their work optimally. As a group facilitator (who is not a music therapist), you may have specific tasks as well as time constraints in your work, which necessitate you to focus on your group’s acts, and respond accordingly. However, by having a sense of their possible meanings, your response will be qualitatively richer in texture and

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intent. The music group we’ve just seen is in a much better position to increase children’s musical and personal (and social and emotional) confidence. Also, some folk are incapable of using words to express themselves (here I am not thinking of someone with a disability, but those for whom words are not the primary medium of self-experience and self-expression). Music offers direct, intimate experience of oneself as part of a group. But, as group leader, you need to be awake! Here is another vignette that shows a direct, musical intervention as a result of not ‘judging’ a child’s ‘misbehaviour’. Vignette 8d It is my weekly session in a mainstream school with a group of eight eight-year-olds. I’m recovering from flu, my energy is low and the children are out of control.I am trying to get them to form a circle,and each time I say something (‘Can we form a circle? Stand still please! Have you tied your shoelace? What’s the matter today?’) someone does a pirouette, someone else does a karate chop, a cartwheel, others slip and fall, someone runs around the group, all laugh hysterically. I am losing patience and vaguely wonder whether to send the lot back to the classroom: I really haven’t the energy today, and am aware of being ‘absent’ to the children. Suddenly I say quickly and firmly: ‘Right, I want you to copy me, are you ready, ev’ry body?’ Quick as a flash, Zinthle mimics me with ‘Are you ready, ev’ry body?’ Her timing, nuance, timbre are totally accurate. While I know that she is sending me up and being ‘cheeky’ – as does the rest of the group – I do not react to this but rather, respond to her immaculate accuracy by mimicking her in turn,with ‘Are you ready,are you ready?’ More children then mimic me with ‘Are you ready,are you ready?’ I respond with ‘Are you ready, yes? Yes?’ – in the same tempo, and with the same energy as them. They mimic me again and off we go, together into the session.

Figure 8.2, below, illustrates the ‘stages’ we move through in this vignette.

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Children Chaotic Group Fragmented

Therapist is tired and becomes impatient with the group

The children recognize the qualitative ‘fit’ as reflecting something of themselves

Zinthle: (mimics) ‘Are you ready, ev’ry body?’

‘Are you ready, ev’ry body?’

Listens to Zinthle’s mimicking and accurate ‘reflecting’

Are you ready? Are you ready?!

‘Are you ready, yes? Yes?’

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Group cohesion: all move and act on a shared experience of music

Figure 8.2 ‘Are you ready, ev’ry body?’

8.4 Split-second Musicking I am mentally and musically unfocused and the children let me know it. The less ‘present’ I am to the children, the more they woo me by behaving atrociously. This could spiral towards a conflict, until my total loss of patience would result in their being sent back to the classroom. Then everyone would be absent, and there would be a serious erosion of trust between us. If I choose to be judgemental, then I see that Zinthle’s intentions are not entirely honourable and I can tell her off, send her to the classroom, stamp my authority on the group or whatever. However, instead of judging her actions, I do two things: I read her act as telling me that the group needs me to be present in a different way; and at the same time I listen to her acute listening to, and rendering of, my statement ‘Are you ready, ev’ry body?’ – and respond to this directly, in turn acutely imitating her splendid imitation of me. At this point, the children’s attention is caught: they recognize the tight rhythmic and musical potential of this quasi rap antiphonal statement. This shifts the group. Whereas previously there had been two sub-groups (me versus the children), two different sub-groups now emerge at the same time: Zinthle and I in one sub-group (my retort to her retort to me), and the rest of the group in the

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other. At the same time, though, I suspect that there is still a split between myself and the children, even if the alliances are shifting very rapidly. (In other words, there are parallel sub-groups operating at the same time.) Also, Zinthle’s own allegiance shifts towards me (I am, after all, acknowledging her with the full beam of my attention). When all the children respond to my response of ‘Are you ready, are you ready?’, the group instantly becomes more cohesive, working in alliance as one. We all become present in the moment. None of these acts are effected through words, but directly through quick musical listening and thinking. Nor are they discussed afterwards. Luckily for us all, I was able to hear the vitality affects – and had just enough presence of mind to respond to the music within her mocking verbal retort.

8.5 Wrapping up In these two examples of working directly within music (Vignettes 8c and 8d), we see, in each instance, the group workers reading behaviours and acts as though they are music – and going with the flow. In the first vignette, the energy of J’s music matches the quality of the children’s ‘behaviours’: their loudness, quickness, sharp movements and generally fragmented intensity. In the second vignette, Zinthle hears and matches the music within my verbal statement with the music in her retort. I hear this matching and know that beneath her precocious behaviour is an acutely empathic child: she knows how to ‘tune in’ to me. Luckily, I hear her tuning in and manage to use this to pull the group towards a cohesive experience. The vignettes in this chapter have all been on work with children and young adolescents. This does not mean that adults do not absent themselves from groups, nor is work with adults that different. Any of these scenarios happen in all kinds of groups, even if the overt acts of adults are somewhat filtered through years of social norms of behaviour. The main point of this chapter is to be alert to the constant shifts and sub-groupings, which adults too will effect although less overtly. These shifting alliances have consequences for the musical acts, which is the focus of your work as group facilitator. They signal which sub-groups exclude and include which members, with each positioning themselves in relation to you as group leader. You need to be alert to who is absent and who is present – as well as to the quality of these presences and absences. (We’ll reflect more on this in Chapter 17). This leads directly to the next chapter in this section, which describes groups flowing – and not flowing – together in music.

CHAPTER 9

Group Flow, Group Pulse – Finding the Groove This chapter describes group musicking that ‘goes wrong’ – and groups that don’t work. All groups ‘go wrong’ at some stage. And we need to manage this.

9.1 Grouping asynchronies or falling apart? Musical anthropologist Charles Keil speaks of the groove to describe people getting into music together. I use his notion of the groove to explain that subtle negotiating of music between folk playing together, which makes them not just ‘sound’ as one, but become one. This chapter can to be read in tandem with Chapter 18 in Part III of this book, since here I begin to use terms such as inter-actional synchrony and communicative musicality, which I explain in that chapter. This, incidentally, symbolizes that one cannot really separate thinking, reflecting and doing group music: they all need to happen at the same time, with each affecting the other. The last part of this chapter begins to consider how one person not flowing can impact on the rest of the group – and on the group roles that all members are ‘forced’ to ‘assume’, as a result. I begin this section by describing musicking with a group whose physical disabilities impact directly on how their music sounds – and the consequences of these multiple arrhythmias on the group whole, and on myself as group leader. Here, different capacities and incapacities for self and interpersonal ‘flowing’ (which we can think of as a synchrony of all the neurological rhythmic cycles within us) may complement or aggravate one another. There are also various accompanying layers of disability – such as emotional and social – as a result of the root physical or neurological disability. In terms of finding ‘the’ groove, in other words, a common groove, group music-making can present as many kinds of asymmetries as there are people.

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How do we manage this in groups? And what can we learn from these ‘falling aparts’? Vignette 9a A group of middle-aged and elderly men and women suffering from Parkinson’s disease have asked me to do an ‘introductory’ session, in order to see whether or not they would like to have music therapy. The setting is informal, a comfortable living room of a residential home, but there is an underlying tension in the situation that I cannot quite get a hold of.I feel that the group is listening to me with close attentiveness – too close for comfort perhaps – I feel slightly put on the spot as I talk about music. I then suggest we do a simple ‘basic beat’ exercise.Each person has a percussion instrument in front of them and I very quietly begin a steady tapping on my Djembe, and invite them, one by one, to join in until we’re all playing the same beat.I notice that some have difficulty in playing on the same beat as me, whilst others manage. We keep going for a while, and suddenly Mr F’s movements become much larger, swooping, diving, ricocheting across his drum, his legs begin twitching and soon, electrifying chaotic movements become larger and larger, and he looks totally ‘out of control’. I then notice that Mr B, on my right, is also beginning to jerk in larger movements. The group beating becomes less synchronized: instead of regular beats, we have a melée of hard,slipping,small,sudden clusters.This feels like musical fragmentation.It cannot be redeemed,as I have no sense of incipient order.The improvisation heaves to a stop. It takes a while for Mr F’s movements to subside. There is a feeling of dismay in the group,and I am shaken,unsure where to go next.Eventually both Mr F and Mr B are still again.

The very thing that was supposed to hold us together – the beat – has let us down. Mr F’s neurological chaos has impacted on us all. We’ve all begun slipping and slithering in our playing, incapable of keeping a steady beat or of pulling ourselves, as a group, towards this. Here are different personal musical and neurological rhythmic and arrhythmic cycles. While they manage to be sounded concurrently, they do not manage to become cohesive: there is no common groove within the music. There is also a sense of the group event becoming increasingly fragmented. The

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only cohesion – if we can call it such – is that we are united in our fragmentation: there is an emotional cohesion in the general dismay: we all feel it. There are various dismays in the moment: dismay on Mr F’s behalf, and also at the rest of the group’s vulnerabilities as a result of their condition. My own dismay is the result of feeling incompetent and insensitive, as though I should have known that this might happen. I naively thought that all of us would manage to find the groove, and that this would bring us together as a group. After all, this is how improvisational music therapy is supposed to ‘work’. Let’s continue with our group. Vignette 9b After the music has stopped, we have a discussion: Mr B says that this always happens to him,even when he begins by tapping very quietly to a piece of music. As soon as there is even a slight crescendo in the music, he says, his body slips out of control. Others in the group then share their own experiences,some similar,some not.The atmosphere in the room becomes lighter as the discussion flows,and we eventually move towards talking about how else we can use music in a meaningful way. As we speak, I begin to realize that since the disabilities in the room are so overt, perhaps the experience of music needs to be an internal one. As if on cue, someone mentions a piece of music that they love, and others join in, talking about the songs they love to hum or remember. We begin to talk about the contexts in which folk first heard the songs they love. The session ends with an impromptu sing-a-long. There is a harmonium in the sitting room, and I find myself accompanying/improvising along to songs from My Fair Lady, with everyone humming or singing snatches of words as they remember them.

In this second part of the session we experienced a repairing of the falling apart. We fell apart in the act of playing music, and got back together again through talking and reflecting on the event together. In other words, we managed to find a mental flow – a shared meaning – where there was no physical or musical ‘flowing’. The physical act of music-making was catastrophic here, emphasizing the group’s varied disabilities. As group leader, I experienced acute anxiety, embarrassment and uncertainty. At the same time, though, it was only after the first attempt at music-making that something ‘new and meaningful’ was able to happen for us all: the second

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act of music-making where we sang a song together. We could posit, here, that this first musical act (which was unmusical in the social, conventional sense) was bonding and necessary, very quickly resulting in a ‘realignment’ within myself – I no longer felt ‘the expert’, or the ‘provider of knowledge’, which social convention dictates that I was. (After all, I had been invited by the group, as one with specific skills that – presumably – the group lacked: I had something that they did not.) The common groove – when we eventually found it by negotiating how we would ‘use’ music as a group (rather than me imposing it by providing Djembe drums) – was provided by well-known songs that the group suggested, and that I managed to improvise at the harmonium. However, during our first attempt at musicking I had taken note of how the group was not able to play together, so that I knew that my playing had to be loose enough, in terms of tempo and phrasing, to accommodate everyone. The harmonies and melodies of My Fair Lady were familiar, in terms of musical grammar and style, and invited folk into the social conventions of singing this particular music together, within a loosely negotiated musical groove. In contrast to this flowing ending, the initial exercise of only the basic beat, with no rhythm, phrasing or melodic shape, was damaging and alienating to the group. It was not a kind of music-making that they were familiar with and, if we think about it, in a one-off event such as this, my initial contribution was way off ‘the mark’. But what is ‘the mark’ – and if it isn’t there, how do we find it? Luckily, in my listening to the general fragmentation of the first musical act, I heard a potential direction – towards another kind of ‘music’. When Mr B spoke of ‘playing along to music’, I was ready to receive a clue: he was telling me that at home, he often listens to recordings of pre-composed music. In other words, he chooses the music that he listens to. He knows what he likes and has access to it. I bear this in mind while listening to the rest of the discussion. The rest of the session follows this cue, and the group flows together. This initially disastrous experience was profoundly humbling, and I learnt from it! My attempt to ‘impose’ a structure, by providing a particular musical exercise that I thought was ‘foolproof ’, resulted in a falling apart of the group. At the same time, we were able to reflect together on this falling apart through talking about it. This talking – and my acute listening – provided the possibilities for another collective groove: the joint creating of something new in music, through singing old, well-loved tunes. Music can do harm! It does not always heal or provide optimal social or collective experience.

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The next two vignettes are with a group of (able-bodied) adult students in a university reading seminar on ‘communicative musicality’. The contrast between the vignettes is obvious – and each offers learning for the group.

9.2 Learning from not-flowing Vignette 9c There are eight of us seated round the table,two hours into a theoretical session on innate musicality. The energy of the group is slow, it is Saturday morning and we are looking forward to the weekend. My intuition is to do some spontaneous improvisation and use this to focus (and close) the morning’s discussion.I hand out hand drums,and to save time, suggest that we remain seated round the table, put the hand drums in front of us on the table, close our eyes and see what happens. The silence gathers intensity and tension. To my left I hear a tiny scratching sound – which stops. There is a sudden loud cluster of rhythmic activity from J on the other side of the table – and then silence again.The group silence this time sounds less tense.I then hear the same small scratching sound from my left,and then a tiny response of sound from the right. A dialogue between these two different small sounds develops and,after a while,other taps begin joining in this quiet dialogue until it sounds as though everyone is playing. Gradually the playing gathers intensity, slightly quicker and louder, and someone begins to hum, soon joined by someone else. This group momentum builds up with all of us tapping and humming. Then we begin to slow, with more and more spaces between the sounds, until once again there is silence. This silence feels soft and spacious. We hold it for a long time. It is difficult to begin speaking – which I need to do to end the morning’s class.I speak very quietly and slowly,and gradually everyone opens their eyes.

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The quality of the group flow, I’d like to suggest, began in the silence – the pre-musical silence. This had a particular quality of gathering intensity and 1 tension. In our discussion J says, ‘I couldn’t stand the silence, it was too tense, I just had to begin playing.’ We all nod – and someone says that the intensity and loudness in J’s playing was the same as that of the silence. We then discuss that, in fact, J’s playing was a ‘spilling’ of this tension from silence into sound. In terms of the group ‘flow’, though, we note that nobody responded to her loud clusters. Instead, the group music returned to silence – although this was a different silence; one that seemed to have expelled some of its tension. Out of this ‘new’ and more spacious silence, a much quieter playing emerged – the tiny ‘scratch’ – which had in it enough space to invite someone else to ‘join in’: a second player to begin a dialogue. Their joint playing seemed to rest within the softer second silence – it was congruent with the second silence’s qualities – again the sounds flowed from the silence. Gradually the others joined in, and together we negotiated our collective playing: increasing in dynamic, tempo and intensity, until someone began to hum, adding melody to our percussive sounds. The hummed response by another person created a vocal duet over our group percussive sounds, and then, interestingly, as the music was beginning to move towards increased intensity, we began to turn towards a silent ending of our piece of music. We commented on the fact that the long silence afterwards had a totally different feel to the opening silence. The students are awed at the uncanny harmony and unity of being in our moments of playing, as though, by magic, we all knew where the music was going. We can explain this by thinking of interactional synchrony – group groove, or group flow. But none of them captures the complexity of attunement by each of us to one another, and to the group as a whole: we all seemed to know when to begin as a group – and we discussed the fact that J’s loud clustered opening was not taken up by anyone and, with great sensitivity, J did not offer it again, as though intuitively sensing that the group would not go in this direction. We could speculate that her personal anxiety forced from her a music that was authentic to her, as a person, but not to her as a group member: the group music. Here the group took precedence. Let’s look at another session with the same group, in the following week. 1

You may want to remind yourself of ‘vitality affects’ in Chapter 6.

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Vignette 9d It is the eight of us again, and this time it is the penultimate day of our intensive six-day group seminar. This time, each person has an instrument of their choice, and we begin a spontaneous improvisation, seated on the floor, with our eyes closed. Very quickly the group finds a group pulse, which is steady – and lacks vitality. Some play rhythmically, others punctuate their playing with accents, and the improvisation remains flat and lacking in momentum. As the group facilitator I sense an underlying quality of different energy which I cannot quite define,and in my playing I offer something louder and faster, thinking that this might elicit this underlying energy. There is no response from anyone in the group, so I offer it again, to check whether or not my hunch is accurate. Again there is no response. The improvisation chunters along, and eventually ends. The feeling in the group is flat, uncomfortable, slightly irritated. We barely manage to discuss this improvisation. Various group members volunteer their experience:some called it cosy,gentle,comfortable, flowing. Someone volunteers that it was very different to the last improvisation we did, and then says that it seemed to get stuck. I then speak of my hunch of another energy, underlying what we did: something like a hidden flow perhaps? One person then says that she did hear what I did in my playing,and decided that she was not going to respond to this. The quality of our discussion – like our playing – is going nowhere,and since it is time for lunch,we end there.I feel tired,heavy – and irritated with the students.

It was only the next day that we were able to have a fuller discussion about what happened in this improvisation. I had been privately wondering whether this group was in a ‘storming’ phase (as in Chapters 2 and 18). The student who spoke of her decision not to take up my musical offering confirmed my hunch. The flatness and lack of momentum in the group flow felt like a group depression, and since our six days together were drawing to a close, I also began to wonder whether this was the beginning of the group closing and saying goodbye. In terms of the group flow, what we see here is the group cohesively entering into a flow that is flat and lacks momentum, and preventing itself from

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moving into an underlying flow, which may have had more energy in it. The point here is that group ‘flow’ is not necessarily happy and positive – there can be as much flow in a collective fragmentation, unease and even in group conflict. But what about when groups do not ‘flow’ because of a lack of ‘fit’ amongst the members themselves? As we’ll see in the last vignette in this chapter, this can impact on the roles that persons assume – either willingly or unknowingly.

9.3 Unflowing roles Rather than staying with flow and lack of flow in music, the last section of this chapter considers the impact of one person not flowing – and how the facilitator addresses this. Vignette 9e This is a one-off improvisation group with a group of adults who are health-care professionals.They have come together as part of a public presentation on Music-as-Communication, and after the morning of theory and video presentations,we are doing an after-lunch experiential ‘workshop’ (a good antidote to the post-prandial somnolence that usually bedevils this time of the day). There are six of us: James has two tall congas, Hannah two large cymbals, S’bongile the bongos, Alfred has the temple blocks, Elena the chromatic vibraphone and I have the large bass drum. We stand in a circle, our instruments in the middle, and, at my suggestion, our eyes are closed. We are ‘waiting’ for sounds to emerge from us. There is a strong silence, which increases in intensity and has a slightly hard, pregnant quality. James bursts into rapid beating on the congas, and instantly, the rest of the group (bar myself) ‘jump in’. James’ playing has the same intensity and slight hardness as the silence before the music. (This silence is what I call the ‘pre-musical silence’,which,in my experience,often signals ‘how’ the music will sound,eventually.See Pavlicevic 1995.) The group continues playing in rapid, accentuated sforzando mode, whilst I give the occasional tap on the bass drum. I begin to feel slightly uncomfortable with the intensity of the sound texture. I become aware of no ‘space’ or ‘breathing’ in the music. Alfred and Elena stop playing. James continues, while Hannah’s cymbal crashes get louder and faster. S’bongile’s bongo playing now seems to have little connection to James or Hannah. She seems to be

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‘doing her own thing’. In fact, all three seem to be in their own musical world. I become annoyed with James whose loud driven beating is dominating the group, and realize that I want him to stop. As though reading my mind, Elena erupts on her vibraphone, with loud, fast and tight clusters of sounds – I have a sense of her challenging James’ playing. The others have stopped playing, and there is an air of expectancy in the group as a whole, apart from James who seems oblivious to the tension surrounding his playing. Suddenly he stops. Elena continues for a split-second after him and stops. She gives a tight giggle. Others laugh tensely. James looks calm. I am relieved that the ‘racket’ has stopped. That lasted about four minutes. And a lifetime. Here is one person’s lack of flow that impacts on the group’s music, and on the musical and interpersonal roles that others in the group are forced to assume. In the group improvisation the pre-musical silence has a hard, expectant quality about it and from this I already know that the music emerging from this silence is likely to be tight and to carry the tension of the silence. James’ playing is rigid. He continues in the same mode: hard, loud, fast, which allows nobody else to make inroads, or impressions upon his playing. Although his playing is organized and predictable, it lacks interpersonal ‘flow’: unable to ‘bend’ and to negotiate the tempo and intensity with the other members of the group, he stamps his individual flow on the improvisation. The rest of the players allow his fast loud beating to dictate and dominate their own playing, and they ‘follow’ his lead – at first. The group apparently is in the same ‘groove’. Can we then think of this group as having ‘found the groove’? Let’s think a bit more. What we hear is that the music is insisted upon by James and not co-created by the entire group. James continues playing, apparently oblivious – with little variation or space for anyone to change what he is doing. His music is impenetrable, only flowing as a separate entity. The others begin to ‘react’, each in his or her own way. Some stop playing. Some get very loud and fast too. And then stop. Others do their own thing, as though James – or anyone else – does not exist. We see a fracturing of group music, with everyone becoming polarized apart from one another. There is a distance – whose quality is hard and unyielding – between the players. In terms of group flow, there isn’t any. The players’ music-making becomes stuck and rigid. This is unlikely to change. Until – in this instance – James stops.

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In the brief verbal feedback after this improvisation, James had no idea whatsoever (surprise surprise) that there was any musical or personal tension in the group. (Incidentally, this is from a real life scenario – and I only just kept my nerve during the improvisation. Everything in me wanted to open my eyes and put my hand on James’ arm to stop him. Since everyone including the audience had their eyes closed, nobody would have seen me. However, I desisted – and allowed the group to sort itself out.) This is a ‘negative’ scenario of how someone can fix their own perseverative flow onto the group, and prevent the group from mutually finding their common groove in music. The group members only experience themselves in a narrowly defined – and imposed – music, and eventually lose interest.

9.4 Concluding thoughts Both this and the previous chapter have described groups in music shifting rapidly: from chaos to cohesion and, in the last example, shifting towards becoming constrained by a narrowly imposed flow. The word ‘flow’ in this sense is not entirely appropriate, since despite its predictability, the music lacks flexibility. This disables the rest of the group from realizing themselves through spontaneous music-making or finding a common groove. We’ve also seen that inherent in any group are sub-groups: their shifts may be very quick, and position the persons in the group differently in relation to one another and to you, as group leader. These examples describe work with – ostensibly – one group at a time. But what if there are clearly defined groups at the same time, each with their own roles and purpose? How do you manage these? Should you even think of yourself as working with one group – or with several? This is the topic of the next chapter.

CHAPTER 10

Whose Group? Whose Music? (and Whose Expectations?) Even though this chapter, once again, describes live-musicking, it is for everyone. I say this because the very nature of music insists on different roles in groups: in choirs, there are the different voices in instrumental groups, sub-groups are determined by instruments, and even the concert performance is made up of different groups: the choir, orchestra, soloists – and audience. This chapter considers the management of various co-existing groups, and also considers the larger group, outside your own music group work, since this is inevitably present much of the time, in your mind. Also worth considering is another kind of ‘other’ group: that which children, especially, carry in mind: their parents and close family members. With all of these various groups floating around the room, and in everyone’s minds, how cohesive can your group be?

10.1 The cohesive group(s)? Vignette 10a It is Saturday morning, which means mothers-and-toddlers music groups in my attic studio at home. We’re well into the session, seated in a circle. The mums sit on hard floor cushions, and their toddlers (aged 20–24 months) are on the floor, each in front of their mothers. (There are no dads today!) This is our fifth session together, and both adults and toddlers are becoming familiar and comfortable with one another. We’ve just finished a clapping and waving song and I put my bag of bells in front of me on the floor. There are cries of ‘oooh!’ and ‘aaaah’ from the mothers, as well as ‘What’s that?’, ‘What have we got today then?’, and ‘Do we remember…? Yes! The bells! It’s the bells!’ and so on. The mothers convey a sense of interest, excitement and anticipation, and 125

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as each child comes towards me, I hand out ‘a bell for mum, and a bell for you!’ As the toddlers take the bells, the mums say ‘Thank you Didi’ on the toddlers’ behalf, encouraging the children to thank me as they receive the bells. Most toddlers return to their mothers with the bells, but today, Nina toddles across to Jamie and shakes the bells in his face. He grimaces and turns away. His mum says, ‘Ooo, we don’t feel like a visit today, do we?’ while smiling at Nina, who continues shaking the bells in Jamie’s face. Nina’s mum moves towards Nina to bring her back to her own cushion: ‘Nina, Nina, come on, have you got my bell? Where’s my bell?’ Nina ignores her mum and waves the bells in the air. The entire group watches her. Gabriel, sitting next to Jamie, begins to look distressed as he sees Jamie covering his face and turning away from Nina. Gabriel’s mum gently takes Nina’s arm to turn her away from Jamie towards her own mum, but Nina shakes her off and moves out of everyone’s reach. At this point, I begin to play a rather up-beat version of ‘Shake your bells to the music’, a delightful song by Chris Achenbach. All the mums shake vigorously and sing. Some toddlers join in, Nina is shaking her bells while walking around the room, out of my vision – but I see reflected on Nina’s mother’s face that Nina is all right. Jamie’s mum is cajoling Jamie to shake the bells, but he throws them on the floor. Gabriel stops playing, and is absorbed in Jamie’s non-playing. His mother now urges him to shake the bells,taking his arm and shaking it in tempo to her own shaking. Gabriel starts to moan and wriggle out of her grasp. All of this takes place in about 35 seconds of a 30-minute music session. There are two distinct groups: mums and toddlers. The mums are invested in their children participating and enjoying the music. Cries of ‘ooh’, and ‘aaah’, greet the packet of bells – or whatever other activity is being announced. There is a collective energy from the mums, on behalf of their toddlers: voicing the interest and anticipation that they hope their toddlers feel. (I often have a sense that the mums and I are in cahoots: we, the adults, collude together to entice the children towards being interested in the instruments, and the activities.) The toddlers are the focus of our collective interest and attention: we watch them constantly, ready to encourage them to ‘play’, to ‘have fun’, to ‘co-operate’, and ‘to perform’. This group is harmonious. There is an easy flow between the adults, as well as fluid shifts from moments when all of us are absorbed in the

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music, to moments when the focus is on the children or a particular child, to moments when as adults we comment or joke amicably about one of the children’s actions. What else goes on in groups such as these? (This next section discusses the vignette in some detail, so skip it if this has absolutely and emphatically no relevance at all to your own work.)

10.2 Whose session is this? The toddlers in the group experience directly their mothers’ investment in the music session, and there appears a common focus for the entire group. At the same time, the mums and their toddlers experience the group differently – with the mothers experiencing a range of group pressures to ‘perform’, and anxieties about the children participating, being disruptive, interfering with another child, and so on. Here, in my role as group leader I need to ensure that I allay the mothers’ anxieties – which are often rather subtle and covert – and allow an atmosphere that is relaxed enough for everyone to ‘feel part of ’ the music, whether or not they are actually participating. For example, we see that Gabriel’s mum takes his arm and shakes the bell on his behalf, since Gabriel is ambivalent about playing. His mum wants both herself and Gabriel to be a part of this collective event. She herself does not stop playing when she shakes his arm: in other words, she too is part of the ‘shaking bells’ song, and at the same time, she is not entirely comfortable with him not playing the bells. As group leader, I am aware of her anxiety – especially since the other children, bar Jamie, are playing, and I need to convey to Gabriel’s mum that neither she nor Gabriel needs to play all the time. He can have time out – and she can enjoy herself without him. I can do this by including her bells in my gaze as I sing the song, and look at each person’s instrument as I sing, conveying that their playing is included in my singing of this song. In other words, I don’t gloss over Gabriel and move on to the next person, just because he is not playing: I spend the same amount of time watching each child (and parent), so that they experience my acknowledgement of the importance of who they are, irrespective of what they are doing – or not doing. Similarly, I need to convey to Jamie’s mum that it is all right for Jamie to throw his bells – as long as he doesn’t hurt anyone in doing so. This can be tricky to do – since Jamie’s mum might be anxious that her child not be seen to be uncooperative, especially since everyone else seems absorbed in playing. She may also be feeling annoyed with Nina’s mum for allowing Nina to walk

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around – after all, it was Nina who set Jamie off in the first place. Again, I need somehow to include Jamie’s mum – and, critically, not interrupt or stop the song ‘until everyone plays’. This is a common mistake. Rather, by playing and singing with conviction and commitment, a musical atmosphere is created that can eventually invite the non-players to ‘play’. If this is indeed our aim. In contrast to the other two mums, Nina’s mum is comfortable with Nina walking around, and appears to play the bells on her own behalf – whilst watching Nina to make sure that she is all right and not annoying or hurting anyone else in the group. Nina feels watched and held emotionally and musically by her mum’s gaze. By participating on her own behalf, Nina’s mum removes any potential pressure Nina might feel were her mum to wait for Nina to play before she herself shakes the bells. I keep track of Nina by watching her mother’s face – since I know that I will see reflected in her face whether or not Nina is all right. I don’t want to turn around and look at Nina, since by doing so, I shall lose the rest of the group, held by my gaze and focus. I’d like to suggest that these are the tiny nuances that ‘make’ or ‘break’ a session. If I were to become apprehensive because some children aren’t playing, or wait until everyone is ready to play, we would have no session at all! I need to ‘manage’ the mothers’ feelings and anxieties – ensuring that they do not feel personally affronted – or like failures – because their children do not want to ‘co-operate’ or ‘participate’. (Here, I am not using these words as part of my own vocabulary or ethos of group work, but rather as how the mothers might themselves feel about their children’s participation or lack of it.) At the same time, I don’t focus on a child who is particularly co-operative and delightful, since another child (or mother–child dyad) will experience this as some kind of lessening of who they are in the group. Lastly, it is worth considering that group pressure to participate can be enormous – and unrelenting. Also, in groups such as these there can be an element of competitiveness (‘her child is more advanced or better behaved than mine’); or feelings of inadequacy: perhaps someone’s child is always immaculately turned out – another dyad are always late – or perhaps two dyads are friends, and have a special rapport in the sessions, that may feel exclusive. Your role as group facilitator is to be supportive of all children and mums – and inclusive. If you get the balance right, you’ll have wonderful sessions! For an excellent guide to making music with young children, see Julie Wylie’s book (Wylie 1996). Although, as we see, there are several groups at the same time – both in the pre-determined and in the dynamic sense – there is a cohesion to this event:

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there is a common focus and locus of interest, and a collective effort and mindfulness. Let’s take a slightly different scenario.

10.3 The split focus Vignette 10b The baby centre group The students on our music therapy programme have a training placement at the Disabled Babies’ Centre (DBC).This means that two students go to the Centre weekly, film their work and then bring their videos to the weekly supervision sessions – where the whole student group plus two supervisors watch the video together. In this way, the group of students experience, and learn from, one another’s work. This week, a student called Jennifer is presenting her group work: there are four babies – all of whom have developmental delay – and each is accompanied by their care-worker. The student group notices immediately that the care-workers appear unenthusiastic, sullen – almost resentful, and Jennifer says that she finds these sessions very difficult.She often has no energy in the session,she feels frustrated and resentful at the carers’ lack of interest. This makes the physical management of the babies difficult: the babies – aged between six and nine months – do as they please, often crawl around the room, pillage through the instrument box, roll on the ground, and so on. Jennifer’s focus is on the babies, but this is insufficient to ‘hold’ their attention, since they need physical support and management, which the carers are supposed to provide. The carers do provide this – but somewhat perfunctorily. They are distracted, at times chat or signal to one another – all of this cuts across Jennifer’s attempts at having a ‘group session’. Jennifer is aware of the carers’ hostility, their negative attitude, and in the supervision group, we discuss her plummeting energy. We also discuss the carers’ own negativity, possibly their low self-esteem, the ambiguity of their role in the music therapy session – for example,how much or how little are they supposed to ‘do’, and how ‘invisible’ they might feel – since the emphasis at the Centre is on the babies, and not on them. Possibly,they feel themselves to be appendages to the babies, who are their charges. We also discuss the contrast between the carers and the babies, who are bright-eyed and alert. Jennifer needs

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the carers to help – at the very least – to manage the babies physically. She would like the carers to be engaged and interested – but this seems a long way off – so, at the very least, we talk about addressing their passive hostility towards her in the session. Although not the focus of this discussion, by now we know that this scenario needs to be seen in the context of the institution in which all of this is happening. As we saw in Chapter 2, institutional dynamics, hierarchies of power and channels of information are critical to maintaining an open flow and making your life as uncomplicated as possible. At the end of the day, it is the clients who suffer if other dynamics interfere with the session itself.

10.4 The hidden group – outside Let’s look at the various groups here. There is the group outside – this is the institution, which is ‘present’ in the session in various ways. In our weekly supervision session, what emerges is that Jennifer has never explained to the care-workers what the session is about, and how she needs their support. Since she is a student, and dovetailing on someone else’s music therapy placement, she has assumed – as have we all – that the Centre is well versed with the goings-on of music therapy sessions, and that the care-workers, therefore, know their roles. As in the mothers-and-toddlers session, there are two distinct groups here. Unlike the mothers-and-toddlers session, however, the two groups do not have a common focus: in fact, the two groups seem convincingly split, with no investment from the care-workers in the babies’ enjoyment or participation in the music session. In fact, rather the opposite. We could posit that the carers are themselves in such personal need, that the session presents them with an opportunity not to be ‘present’, mentally or emotionally. The session is possibly a ‘rest’ time for them. How do we address the duality of this event? Incidentally, this half-fictionalized scenario is one that I have experienced in many different contexts, with many client groups. The point here is that the two groups seem to have almost nothing in common – apart from being in the same place and time. Can this, therefore, be thought of as one group? Should Jennifer run a separate session for the carers, prior to the one of carers-and-babies? Unlikely that the institution would allow it and, in any case, who would ‘look after’ the babies during this time?

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In our supervision student group discussion as to how Jennifer might address this situation, the group agrees that perhaps Jennifer needs to spend the next session with only the care staff, listening to their experiences and expectations of the sessions, and also talking about her aims and anxieties. In this way, we hope, Jennifer and the care-workers might negotiate the roles. But first, we remembered that Jennifer has to clear this with the rather strict Head of the DBC. Vignette 10c A month later, Jennifer’s group is in the supervision ‘spotlight’ once again, and we begin by asking her how she has been getting on at the DBC. Jennifer reports on her meeting with the care-workers, which was somewhat uncomfortable at first.It transpires that on ‘Music Day’ the time of the session interferes with the Centre’s routine, and the carers lose out on one of their two morning breaks. Also, they then have to rush through the babies’ tea-time in order to get them ready for physiotherapy. The care staff seem unhappy at this state of affairs, and Jennifer asks for their advice as to what might ease this situation. At this moment, the atmosphere in the discussion began to lighten, with the staff suggesting that what would help is if the music session could be after the babies’ tea-break.Jennifer agrees to discuss this possibility with the head of the Centre, who agrees to the change. As a result of their meeting, Jennifer reports that she now feels more confident in inviting the carers to contribute songs that they know from their childhood and from their children.These now form a ‘slot’ in the music session. Also, one of the carers has expressed an interest in playing some of the percussion instruments that Jennifer brings – and although this results in some teasing by the other care-workers, generally there is more of a sense of their being included in the session. At the end of Jennifer’s report, the student group discusses how this has become two sessions with two groups, within the format of one session – ostensibly for the babies. What is rather confusing for the entire group is that they remember attending the DBC’s end-of-year concert as first-year students, and noting how proud the staff seemed to be of its music input. In fact, the students remember some of the carers in the video from the end-of-year concert the previous year.

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One of the critical points of this brief vignette is that the ‘institution’ cannot be left outside the session: literally, figuratively or emotionally. Its routines, structures, relationships and power struggles will be present in sessions, in one form or another. Here, then, is a hidden group, ostensibly ‘outside’ the session, whose nuances can impact forcefully on your work. As we saw earlier, organizations have complex dynamics – and unless you are aware of them, and address these head on, you could be walking into a hornet’s nest.

10.5 The volunteer group The vignettes so far present ‘double’ groups that belong together – in the sense of being a part of a family or of an institution. I now look at another kind of group whose presence is – in some ways – more complicated: the volunteer group. Vignette 10d It is time for our weekly Tuesday afternoon outing of profoundly disabled young adults from a residential home to a Community Centre in a nearby village.I’m responsible for co-ordinating the outing: negotiating with the care-staff to have the youngsters ready, with the driver to help load the wheelchairs (rather than reading the local rag and having a fag); with the Community Centre manager for ensuring that everything is ready at his end for our music session. We arrive at the Community Centre,to be met by the enthusiastic and committed group of volunteers. Each meets ‘their’ charge, with whom they have built up enormous rapport and affection over the year. Soon we are inside the Centre, ready to begin our Music and Movement session. The volunteers are enthusiastic, vocal, dedicated – and utterly obstructive. The session exhausts me, and I find myself becoming gloomier as the afternoon progresses. This happens each week, and I’m not sure why. There is no stillness during the session. There’s much laughter, bouncing the disabled youngsters up and down on the inflatable (in any case the noise of the inflatable dements me), everyone shrieks with excitement and a sense of bonhomie. I feel compelled to fit in with the group’s energy; while at other times my sense of loyalty to music and music-making gets the better of me, and I attempt to introduce some kind of silence – or at least, softer dynamics. This is

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usually met with good-natured, affectionate tolerance (she’s the musician now, she knows what she’s doing, we’d better listen, sssshhhhhhh…) and so on. More loud laughter. How might we make sense of all of this? The volunteers are enormously good hearted and supportive, giving of their free time, week after week. Also they have formed genuinely affectionate bonds with their charges – so what’s the problem? Had I known, then, that the volunteers’ own needs for recognition, affirmation and support were being voiced – rather glaringly, as it happens – I might have been more tolerant, empathic and, critically, I might have made a difference to this group. Instead, I never resolved the group dynamic; never could assert myself (in any case I was a lot younger, chronologically and emotionally) – and, to all intents and purposes, it was a ‘successful’ event, earning us coverage in the local press and even on regional television. One way to make sense of tensions in groups is to monitor your own response and, more than this, to listen to this response. In the two vignettes, the music-worker has a clear sense of things ‘not working’. The student is able to respond to this feeling by investing time for discussion, reflection and then putting into action some strategies to clarify and address the ‘problems’. The community musician, above, has no idea that there might be something to be addressed – all she knows is that she ‘dreads’ the sessions, they seem to ‘undo’ her. And she never listens to these feelings.

10.6 Whose music? In Chapter 5 we thought about the feelings of attachment and of ownership that many of us have to a particular piece of music or song (we’ll also look at this in more detail in Chapter 12). In work with ‘double’ (or multiple) groups, providing the music for more than one group at a time is complicated, and raises the question: whose music is this? In the mothers and toddlers’ group, the mums are happy to be a part of their children’s music, so that here I can choose ‘age-specific’ music and activities. However, the music that I arrange or compose for these sessions is not just for toddlers: harmonic colour and intensity, phrasing and rhythmic patterns even in a well-known nursery rhyme can be harmonically or rhythmically ambiguous enough to be interesting to all in the group (myself included). For example, a ribbon song which I have composed involves mums and their toddlers each holding one end of the ribbon, and during different verses they wriggle the ribbon on the ground, swing it from

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side to side, wriggle it like a snake and so on. Critically, the song is upbeat, has warm harmonies, a lovely melody – and is immensely popular. It is one of the songs that mums always mention if we meet again months or even years after the sessions. I suspect that its popularity stems from its musical and emotional capacity to straddle the various groups. Similarly, with the volunteer group, I adapted well-known songs of the local genre which everyone knew, to accompany the movements of the volunteers and disabled young folk. We didn’t just blast our way through local folk songs: these were arranged with great care. From the volunteers’ comments I knew that the songs held meaning for them. In the Disabled Baby Centre, Jennifer invites the care-workers to contribute songs for the sessions, and this results in a collective pool of music being generated. By asking them to bring children’s music that they know from their own lives, she avoids the situation of having to ‘reject’ some of this music as less suitable, because it is too explicitly adult, and at the same time creates an opportunity for all to learn the music of one another’s lives. In each of these instances, the music chosen or composed managed to straddle the complexities of having more than one group at a time in a session. However, at times it is the ‘helpers’ (whether family, institutional or volunteers) who need the music to hold meaning for them, because they need to become more fully engaged in the music, and this may be the way to manage eventually to knit together the various groups in the session. I now present a different scenario – the concert performance – that turned into an unexpected musical offering.

10.7 The concert performance Living in South Africa provides an exquisite palette of different musical genres – on a macro-social level, that is both problematic and enriching. Different social groups are invested in certain genres by collective historical associations – and I have learnt to familiarize myself with the original/traditional/collectively sanctioned contexts before assuming that I can ‘use’ the music of another social group. This vignette describes a macro-social convention: the symphony concert.

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Vignette 10e I have just returned to Johannesburg from a year in Europe, and am invited to a choral symphony concert as a gesture of ‘re-entry into Africa’. The concert is in the Johannesburg City Hall – a splendid Victorian building with chandeliers and wooden panelling. The programme includes a work entitled African Symphony – by a European composer who is conducting the performance. On stage is the symphony orchestra, in traditional concert garb, some African drummers who (despite the winter chill) are clad in leopard skins, beads and feathers, and the choir – a splendid array of African traditional colours, with some of the women’s head-dresses approaching the ceiling. The conductor arrives, and after the rituals of tuning, applauding and bowing,the work begins.It is a mixture of looped electronic tapes of ‘bush’ sounds that include birdsong, animal noises and night sounds of Africa; the drummers whose magnificent torsos are a visual delight, plus the orchestra and choir’s exemplary Western-African renderings. The music is unsatisfactory; neither quite African nor interesting enough as Western ‘art’ music, and I feel restless, my attention watching the choir and the drummers, rather than listening to the music. At the end of the concert, we applaud, the orchestra and choir bow, and we begin to rise from our seats, collecting our scarves and coats. Suddenly the hall erupts, and we look up, startled, to see that the choir is in the throes of something like an ecstatic trance, swaying and clapping, stamping and singing in a deep full-throated sound that is utterly riveting. The city hall vibrates with the astonishing energy – nothing like the African Symphony – and the audience too begins to clap and (genteelly) sway. The choir collects us all in thrilling raw energy. While clapping, stamping, swaying and singing and whistling, with increasing energy, I notice with some astonishment, that the orchestral musicians continue wiping their instruments,chatting to one another,folding the music and walking off. Then three fellows in overalls walk onto the emptying stage and begin moving the Steinway Grand. I feel hysterical, as though I am dreaming: the choir, by now, is streaming off the stage

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and down the aisles, scooping us all into its magic whilst, apparently, the ‘musicians’ do not hear or see or feel this music. We return to our cars excited and energized, and I finally feel truly back in Africa. So – what was going on? Perhaps the orchestral musicians felt that the spontaneous African music was not part of the (social convention that is the) concert, or part of their reality as to what constitutes music. This music apparently did not ‘belong’ to them. Their job was done. How depressing. Perhaps, for the choir, (and certainly for my friends and me) the real music began after the concert. Here was music that felt authentic and – although unfamiliar to us in sound or words – it included us: we were expected, and invited to be part of it, in that exquisitely generous and irresistible African way. And yet, my friends and I are not ‘African’ – it was not really ‘our’ music. So why did this feel so irresistible and warming on this chilly Jo’burg night? Not only were there different groups (and groupings) at the concert: obvious ones like the orchestra, choir and drummers; the collection of folk on the stage and the audience in the hall; but the music also created distinctive social boundaries. During some of the performance, we all became one group: attentive playing, listening, creating the event as one. During other parts of the music – say when it was the drummers and the choir only – the orchestra joined the audience in listening. At other times, the audience seemed fragmented in its listening. And so on. After the ‘concert’, another grouping emerged: those who entered into the spontaneous choral ecstasy, and those who ignored it. These two groups cut across the conventional groupings of ‘who’s who’ in the concert arena and, critically, this other music managed to turn some of the ‘listeners’ (i.e. the audience) into active musicians. Also, although the music was not mutually negotiated, in the sense that the music ‘belonged’ to the choir, rather than to the audience, the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic ‘groove’ had enough latitude and flexibility – as well as enormous driving energy – to allow us to ‘become part of it’. What a privilege! What splendid (and kind) nose-thumbing at that archaic arrogance that assumes that one musical genre, with all of its social resonances, can be imported and plonked directly into another.

10.8 Concluding rites This tale carries various messages. We began the chapter by exploring the complexities of the multi-group – both external and systemic to the group – and noting that the two are not necessarily identical. We also considered distinct

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groups as defined by institutionally defined roles, group roles and by the nature of the musical activity. We also noted that roles and sub-groups generally ebb and flow, creating different boundaries within the (whole) group, and that you need to be alert to some of the roles (and boundaries) being implicit and not always ‘known’ to the members themselves. The challenge is for you, as group ‘leader’, to use the ‘fault lines’ creatively. In other words, don’t make these into a ‘problem’ but, if you can (and if the group allows you to), into a celebration of diversity. Finally I’ve dipped into a conventional social ritual – the symphony concert – that seems to miss a ‘nerve’: we’ve touched on who the music ‘belongs’ to, and for whom it feels authentic – and false. This – as we’ll discuss again in Part III – is not always predictable. A theme that is emerging throughout this section of the book is that every group musical event is a microcosm of society: people coming together for a specific purpose. The regular, ongoing meetings of people generate human relationships, and also group ‘habits’. The next section considers the role and place of ‘habits’ that have emerged spontaneously in your work together. I reframe these as ‘rituals’ – with the emphasis on a small ‘r’ – in order to acknowledge the social emphasis and undertow of groups in music.

CHAPTER 11

Group Rituals If we understand music groups – as described in this book – as micro-societies, each with their social hierarchies, norms, values and beliefs, then it makes sense that the groups develop their own social rituals over time that become important to a particular group. These emerge from that combination of people who meet regularly, and may be a variation of the wider social context as well as the disciplinary context and, within that, the specific purpose of the group’s coming together. Here, though, we need to pause a moment to consider that any discipline, whether music education, special education, community music, church choral conducting, orchestral rehearsals or music therapy, is a social convention that reflects the values, norms and beliefs of its founding members, as well as codes of conduct that are a combustion of society at large plus the social microcosm that is the specific context. Thus, while it may be usual for a church choir to begin rehearsals with a prayer, this might be viewed as out of place in a secular music education context. In fact, if someone assumed that praying opened such a meeting (because of their own social conventions), they might well be breaking the taboos that belong to this specific social context. Similarly, music therapists trained in the Nordoff-Robbins approach who worked in special education in the early days of this approach, often opened their sessions with a ‘greeting song’, which for a time became part of the collective conventions of the sessions. Your music appreciation groups are as likely to develop their own rituals (e.g. offering mints at the beginning of your session), as is your music class. One group of primary school children with whom I once worked always removed their blazers at the beginning of our class. This was done ceremoniously, with the blazers neatly piled in a corner (usually by the bossiest girl in the class). After this, the children assembled near me, which I took as a signal that ‘the music could begin’. This chapter is brief, touching lightly on the profundity and magic of music in groups.

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11.1 Social rituals and group music Christopher Small defines rituals as ‘A means by which we experience our proper relation with the pattern which connects, the great pattern of the mind.’ (1998, p.13). While Small is a musicologist rather than a sociologist, his definition is apt, and sufficiently abstract for us to consider it in a variety of ways. World religions generally provide socially sanctioned collective rituals that give us a sense of belonging to an inherited traditional culture. These rituals help us to experience various aspects of (social) human living: being ill, recovering, being born, married or divorced and dying. There are times when groups of people need to address and experience some kind of collective ritual in order to address the very issue that generated them as a group in the first instance. In other words I am thinking of a collection of people who have, by chance, undergone a similar experience (e.g. a train crash), who may not have been a group at all before this incident. I am also thinking of staff groups, for example, who after a collective traumatic event experience themselves as another kind of group. Here, some kind of ‘ritual’ may help to re-image the event, to experience a recreating of it in order to be able to manage it in the rest of their lives – especially where a religious ritual is inappropriate for all kinds of cultural/ social/ethnic sensibilities. Incidentally, the notion of ‘ritual’ is not limited to something religious or with spiritual overtones; nor is it limited to having a specific task, determined by the group or the event. Sociologists explain that most social groups generate group rituals in one or other form: think of the graduation ceremony at institutes of higher education; the prize-giving ceremony at the end of the school year; the closing dinner at the end of conferences or – as Christopher Small so brilliantly describes – the symphony concert. I also make a distinction here between those group rituals that are socially prescribed (or socially sanctioned) and those that emerge spontaneously, and that we might miss if we don’t pay attention.

11.2 Emerging rituals in group music In the mothers-and-toddlers group described in Chapter 10, one ritual that has emerged over our weeks together is the time it takes to collect and hand out the instruments. This began in session two, when one of the toddlers received an instrument from me and their mum said ‘Taaa – say “taa” to Didi for the bell’. This has led to other mums saying something similar, the toddlers beginning to thank me – until this has become a regular feature of this group. What has distinguished this as a ritual – rather than just a ‘regular behaviour’ – is that it

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seems to carry significant meaning for all in the room. I heard and felt this ‘meaning’ from the start, and made space for it accordingly. This then developed further, with the toddlers collecting two instruments from me and then handing one to their mums. The toddlers thank me and are, in turn, thanked by their mothers as they receive their bells. This thanking has now become part of receiving and returning the instruments – instigated by the mothers. It is one of the recurring moments in all the sessions – often a point of rest in between activities, a point that links different musical activities as well as drawing a distinction between them. We see here the toddlers being ‘inducted’, so to speak, into one of the pervasive social rituals: of receiving, thanking, handing out and being thanked. Another emerging group-specific ritual in the ‘volunteer group’ vignette (Vignette 10d) was the removing of shoes, anoraks and scarves at the beginning of sessions, and their retrieving at the end. The quality of group energy here was ‘different’, and I listened closely, and learned to allow time and space for this each week. In other words, the social ritual is not formal or stylized. However, most groups develop their own – often in very subtle ways. Your sensitivity to these moments – especially when these recur – can make a remarkable difference to the quality of your sessions. Although folk may not ‘notice’ these moments, they will have a sense that something special is happening. Incidentally, choirs and orchestras have their own rituals (without labouring the point or psychologizing these). Listen out for them. Orchestral tuning is one of them: that moment when you and your instrument ‘connect’, and you all gather yourselves for ‘the performance’ – there is a frisson of expectation, a galvanizing of energy both in the orchestra and the audience, a respectful listening by everyone.

11.3 Developing a ritual There are times, though, when as musicians we may be pivotal for the collective social need for a ritual specific to that time, place and those persons. In the vignette below my role as musician was pivotal, although I had no idea how the ritual would develop.

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Vignette 11a Living in South Africa during the run-up to the first ‘democratic elections’ in 1994 was immensely tense, fraught and frightening. At the time, I was ‘temping’ for a youth organization, doing logistical support for a National Youth Conference. Joe, a young man from Soweto, was murdered soon after I left – in one of those pointless random acts of violence that plunged most of his colleagues into darkness. I heard, through friends, that staff were afraid to return to work because Joe’s ghost was around: they would not go into his office, people were depressed, becoming ill, not turning up for work and so on. After a sleepless night of trying to deal with this dreadful event, I called the director of the organization and suggested that we do a group ‘ritual’, as a healing, grieving and cleansing experience. I felt rather sensitive about this, as someone no longer part of the organization. She, however,encouraged me to pursue this,while promising to check with her staff as to whether or not they felt this was appropriate. Meantime, since I felt rather ill-equipped to plan the ritual alone, I approached ‘Simon’, a Methodist minister who lives in Soweto, and whose intuitions I trust. (Incidentally, I did not approach Simon because he is a minister – but rather because he lives in Soweto and manages to straddle the cultures of that city as well as that of ‘Western psychological thinking’.) Together we planned a group event, and I then called the director to run through what Simon and I had discussed. The staff group was very keen to do this, especially as they knew me (and they also knew that I was a music therapist). The appointed day came, and we all assembled in Joe’s office, seated in a circle around his desk. Each of us lit a candle and placed it on Joe’s desk. The ritual had four sections, each punctuated by a piece of recorded music that we felt reflected a quality and texture of feeling to do with each ‘stage’. It didn’t quite work this way. We began with each of us saying what Joe had meant to us as colleague and friend – which for some people became an occasion for voicing their feelings of guilt about having had feelings of envy, enmity and aggression towards him.After this the group spontaneously began to sing a hymn – rendering the recorded music unnecessary. The next two sections allowed each of us to speak of how we would miss him –

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and here people spoke of missing the sound of his voice, his eccentric dress, his mannerisms, his wisdom, his love for Shakespeare – and what we needed to do to bid him farewell. Again there was spontaneous singing that was profound, grave, sorrowful and imbued with gravitas, which Simon and I ‘held’, by allowing the grief and sorrow to be expressed. Finally, the ritual shifted to how we would celebrate him – and the group’s singing here had a different texture and colour. Simon and I knew that the energy of the group had shifted. We closed the prepared part of the ritual with each one of us symbolically extinguishing our candle, as a sign of sending Joe’s spirit on its way and,as we sat silently and watched the smoke rise in the room,the group began to sing a song in the local vernacular with gentle and deep intensity. Some of us did not know the song, and joined in, humming and harmonizing. The music continued, over and over again, with the singing changing as each cycle of the song was revisited. The singing ended and there was silence. Someone then said something and everyone burst out laughing. We opened some bottles of wine and beer,and began the final ritual,of celebrating ourselves as a group without Joe. This event provided a focus for the group to share their emotions around their individual and collective relationships with Joe, as colleague and friend, and to begin life anew as a group now that he was no longer present. The event was an emotional catharsis, enabled through careful planning and – critically – flexible execution of the plan (we did not use the pre-recorded music that we had prepared, and the ritual took almost three hours – we had anticipated two). Also – in terms of the discussions on aims and briefs in Part I of this book – Simon and I discussed our brief very carefully, checked several times that our aims were in accordance with the staff group’s needs, and ensured that the director also briefed the staff group clearly about the purpose of this one-off session. Our planning and flexibility enabled the group to feel ‘held’ by myself, Simon and the music – although not in the way that we had anticipated (the group sang their own songs, rather than us playing musical recordings). Also, despite the high level of emotional charge in the room, which at times spilled into tears and sobbing, there was a sense of collective anchoring: Simon and I were both inside and outside the group, able to be present in a calm and clear way, and not becoming drawn into the levels of group hysteria which at times we were well aware of. The latter is critical since the group needed us as

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‘beacons’ – who were both a part of, and also not a part of them: hence the need for outside facilitators. Had one of the staff group led the ritual, the chances of this event becoming fragmented would have been higher. Also, Simon and I, through our respective training and experience, knew that we could, between us, ‘manage’ the feelings in the room – and had talked this through at length when planning. Pivotal to this ritual was the music. Equally pivotal was our flexibility in ‘ditching’ what we had prepared! (I cannot stress this enough!) The act of singing familiar and communal hymns was a chalice for collective feelings of grief. The melody, words and the colour of each of the songs were profoundly moving, moving us towards one another, towards the spirit of Joe and towards our deepest sense of collective presence. Here is a group recreating itself: creating a sense of new identity and community, after the loss of one of its members. Critical, also, is that this ritual was not imposed on the group. It was suggested, and then left to the group to decide whether or not – and how – they wanted a group event to deal with their loss. Obviously, the ‘setting of norms’ was a far more implicit affair than that described earlier in the chapter – as was the evaluation. Simon and I got together after this, to ‘de-brief ’ one another, and also gauge whether we ‘missed’ anything. We also spoke with the director – a further way of assessing and evaluating, albeit in an informal way.

11.4 Imposing rituals (at your own risk…) The next vignette describes a group ritual that was – to some extent – imposed, and highly problematic, although, in the end, our initial ‘hunch’ for ‘imposing’ it proved to be correct. Vignette 11b A group of us once worked in the arts in the psycho-geriatric wards of a local hospital. The staff dynamics were horrendous: the nurses resented anyone doing ‘therapy stuff’ – and luckily, those of us at the butt of their aggressive feelings and splendid sabotaging of every single session, formed a support group. The medical staff was disinterested in the wards, and the hospital administration, although supportive of the arts therapies, had little energy to address the complex problems on the ward.Our support group decided,partly as a result of our own feelings of bleakness in this arid emotional landscape, to do a ‘Christmas ritual’, knowing full well that we would meet obstacles

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along the way. This was negotiated rather carefully and we persuaded the hospital administration as well as the nursing matron to allow us to go ahead. We invited family members, brought our own friends and family (since we felt the need for some moral and musical support), sheet music and lots of candles (which needed to be cleared with hospital administration because of fire regulations). On the appointed evening, we processed, singing and holding candles, along the long ward corridor – and gradually the nurses’ embarrassment and diffident attitude softened. At the end of the singing of carols, we all had some sherry and mince pies, and there was some rather guarded dancing that gradually got livelier on experiencing the enthusiasm of patients, family and friends. It was an unexpected transformation – and not an easy one. Also, whilst our ritual was moderately successful, it did not have the long-lasting effects that we had rather naively hoped for. We were not invited to repeat it the following year, and neither did we have the energy to go through all the bureaucracy involved in preparing it. Events such as these are potentially enriching, on many levels – historical, cultural, social, musical, personal. They can be transformative for a group, generating feelings of bonding and belonging as well as an experience of ‘sacredness’ – which does not always have to be religious or especially serious. Also, in multicultural societies, there are religious sensitivities and levels of tolerance, and one way to think about this is to negotiate a ritual with the group (or institution, as in this case) that sidesteps cultural and social prescriptions.

11. 5 Concluding rites Without wishing to sound precious or sanctimonious, it is my experience that our work as group musicians often confronts us with a sense of something other, that we cannot altogether fathom. Working in Africa has taught me that the sacred does not necessarily belong inside religious institutions (in fact in such places this is often spectacularly absent). African society’s openness to the inexplicable and the immaterial has alerted me to ‘the sacred’ that exists in the generally secular work that we do. A very ordinary group session in a secular setting can suddenly change to a magical moment. Most times we hold this magic in the stillness of our listening, but there are times when we may have to act, in order to institute it. This is not

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always easy to do, nor simple to execute – but if you have a strong sense (and can check this out with colleagues) then do it! You run the risk of being rejected, and of meeting utterly convincing reasons as to why your idea is nonsensical – why don’t you just ‘stick to your brief’? Well, as we know, music does not always obey the laws of reason, and often, reason is infinitely enriched by…why, music of course!

CHAPTER 12

Live Meanings – Listening to Music The last chapter touched on the generating of collective and social rituals; and this chapter begins with a natural follow-on, looking at standard social rituals of modern societies: these include the concert performance, the church service, social rites that include baptisms, weddings and funerals. As all musicians, at one or other times, are called to select music for any one of these social rituals and also, at times, to ‘perform’ or else ‘lead’ these, this chapter concludes with exploring the complexities of selecting music for groups. The emphasis in this chapter is on how musical experiences become personally meaningful, both individually and collectively.

12.1 Music and social context Vignette 12a: Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – from Pakistan – at Barbi-khan – in London-stan The Master glides onto the stage with his followers: the audience erupts into ecstasy,whistling,shouting,weeping and swaying on its feet. And subsides instantly. He sits, on the stage floor, this vast garlanded man, cross-legged, solidly soft – the harmonium drones, the tabla ripples, and the master’s singing begins to sway, pull, cajole and tease. The fire of his music trickles towards us and is emptied into the audience, which gasps, moans, claps and sways – unbearably, until he retreats the music from us and we become limpid, still, our passions cool. His hands shape the song, moulding, weaving, receiving it from us and turning it away – the audience moans and raises its hands, stands begging for the music to return.He tosses it suddenly into the horizon, we swoon. He retrieves it at the last moment, drawing us all into a volcanic pulse in which we clap,sway,moan,click our fingers,becoming this voluptuous mass.

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I understand neither the music nor a word of high Urdu, and am part of the mass ecstasy whilst also being a voyeur. Our charming Sikh neighbours explain at the interval that the master is singing Ghazzals, for which he is world renowned. The Barbican has pulled out all the stops – the audience is attired in traditional glistening dress. My companion and I have come directly from work and feel ashamed of our everyday London work garb.The smell of samosas is irresistible. Here is music that ‘means’ in very different ways for different folk in the audience. These multiple ‘knowings’ and meanings seem to conflagrate into a massively bonding collective human event. Let’s try and make sense of this. First of all, there are highly specific, culturally embedded codes of meaning to do with the Ghazzals, the high Urdu epic love-poetry that much of the audience knows. They join in noisily at times, and quietly at others – this feels like a specific regional ‘knowing’ from which some – like ourselves – are excluded. At the same time, we are drawn into the collective social ritual, which is one where audience participation is expected and anticipated by the musicians. Here is the direct physical and emotional impact of the music on everyone present, even if its genre and associations are unfamiliar to some of us. The music impacts on us directly, together with the audience’s moans, swoons, cheers, howls and hushings – the last seem to have to do with the musical grammar and verbal narrative of the songs. Even though my companions and I miss the nuances of collective embodied musical meaning, we feel included – indeed how could we not be drawn into the massive musical energy around us! However, the opposite might have happened: we could have found ourselves watching, listening, bemused and uncomprehending; we could have felt excluded from the ‘inner sanctum’ of the concert. Why did this not happen instead? Social music psychologists inform us that the older we get and the more we accumulate knowledge about our own music, the more we begin to ‘look around’, so to speak, and ‘collect’ an understanding of musical genres less similar to those of our own culture. Thus, while I cannot pretend to be knowledgeable about the nuances of the music of the Indian sub-continent, I have heard some recordings as part of my musical history, and am able to make some kind of ‘sense’ of the music itself. It is not totally unfamiliar in sound, although the entire event – from which the music can hardly be separated – collects my friend and me into its voluptuous hysteria. There is also the exaltation of being part of a huge collection of people that becomes as one in the moment: this ‘oneness’ is formed by both the performers

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and the ‘audience’. All seem to be a part of the music, and we all experience a profound human experience of collective intimacy – of managing to be of one mind and soul in music – even though the music and its narrative content remain outside our ken. We also see here that unlike the Western ritual of ‘the classical music concert’, the distinction between performers and audience is spurious. We are in the midst of the music – we are part of its being created, so that we both experience a musical adventure, a letting go of musical expectations and the social norms that we usually associate with being at the Barbican. Here is another ‘way of being’ and the friendly coercion of the group – the audience – invites my companion and me to become part of this. We experience human inclusivity, generated by the music. Also, there is the spectacle, the theatre of the occasion: I am riveted by the Master’s arm and hand movements as he sings. He is a large solid man, and his movements are elegant, graceful – through watching them I have a sense of ‘understanding’ the music. I thrill with delight at this most sensuous experience that appeals to all of my senses. As to the music itself, I can barely remember it. I have difficulty ‘imagining’ it – in my mind. It probably went on a bit – with a liquidity that ebbed and flowed. I remember the pieces being very long. When I listen to my CD of Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn, I am not sure that the music itself really engages me, until I remember the concert. Also, as I write of the concert, now, I recall the totality of the event: the lighting of the Barbican foyer, the early spring chill outside, the smell of perfume and food, the frisson of excitement, the children running around, the delightful young men sitting next to us in the audience, and their patient explanation of some of the epic poems. Finally, this event was a social affair. The musicking of everyone within that concert hall was electrifying and powerfully cohesive, and gave each of us an ‘other’ experience of ourselves; one that has become part of our personal and social identity. That was an exceptionally powerful and positive cohesive social experience, generated by music in which, curiously, the distinction between performers and listeners was physically set. There was a space for musicians (the stage) and another for the ‘audience’. Let’s now look at another event – which turned out to be a less happy one, despite its assumptions of unity and human bonds.

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Vignette 12b It is Evensong at Keble College in Oxford,at the end of the second day of the Music Therapy World Congress. Like many others, I am assembled with them in a beautiful chapel,and awed by the history and tradition of the splendid architecture and the ambience. Part of the service is sung by the choir, and there are three hymns which all of us are invited to sing. Immediately distinctive sub-groups begin to form: some people know the hymns very well and sing these loudly. To others, the hymns are familiar, and they bumble along, following the words,and managing to keep going,except where,every now and then, their voices swoop in the ‘wrong’ direction. Others are not English-speaking, so they hum or sing the hymns wordlessly. Others, again, are totally silent, and are not even looking at the words in the ‘Order of Service’ pamphlets.

In contrast to the previous vignette, here, confusingly, is an event that apparently emphasized the social and cultural differences between the various groupings in the congregation. In fact, the music itself generated the sub-groups, since, up until that time, we had all been ‘music therapists attending the World Congress’. Some folk had a strong sense that the hymns ‘belonged’ to them (and to their culture), and made the point emphatically – by singing loudly. At the same time, some felt partly in and partly outside that culture; whilst others were rendered emphatically outside, through not knowing either the tune or the words: they were ‘disowned’ by the music. Others still were not of the Christian faith, and viewed the event as a theatrical performance. These two vignettes convey a simple and powerful point: that music can both make us feel a part of the group, and just as easily, very much outside the group. Whether we find ourselves inside or outside, there is clearly something about the act of musicking together that creates a group feeling – as anyone who has ever attended a public pop concert will know. Let’s now think about how to select music for events – and how it might hold meaning for different people at the same time.

12.2 Whose music? (And whose meaning?) If you’re presenting a programme for a musical appreciation group; or having to select music for a ‘social ritual’ of whatever kind, it may be helpful to consider what the music might mean for the listeners – and players. We saw in another

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part of this book that certain songs or pieces of music have strong associations with folk who experience a sense of ownership: it is ‘their’ song or their piece of music. Let’s now think about the different aspects to do with music, dealings and meanings. It may be useful to begin by reminding ourselves that most highfunctioning children as well as musically untrained adults can make sense of music, by being a part of a social culture. Thus, children are able to distinguish between well-formed and ill-formed musical sequences (Sloboda 1985), while untrained adults are able to reproduce folk melodies (Sloboda and Parker 1985 in Sloboda 1999). Most of us, it seems, are able to ‘make sense of ’ music ‘for ourselves’, so to speak, without having to study music formally, unless it falls outside grammar and syntax with which we are familiar. Here, other aspects emerge that render music meaningful – that have more to do with the emotional associations of the music in terms of the time, place or context in which we experienced it. For a start, we cannot assume that the music of our culture (whatever that means in these unhomogeneous days) will hold similar meanings and enjoyment for those of different ages, ethnicities, geographical regions or social class. At the same time, the converse also stands: thus we cannot assume that just because you and I are of different ages and ethnicities and live in different parts of the world, we will not have common musical tastes. Here is a paradox of musical experience: that both universal and culture-specific meanings co-exist (Becker 2001), and that music means in complex, multilayered ways. Thus, the meanings that we imbue with music are both highly individual, socially constructed and culturally nuanced, as well as being live, ongoing and unfolding. The choice of musical material for group work needs to be considered carefully: at the very least, music with powerful national – or tribal – associations (like anthems, football songs, traditional wedding or funeral or military music) is difficult for listeners to divorce from those collective and usually time-specific associations. Personal experiences and associations may, however, override the traditional, inherited collective meanings. Here, teaching refugee groups the traditional songs of their host countries begins to make sense: offering those in exile some insights into the host cultures, and tiny experiences of ‘being a part of ’ another culture. At the same time, by singing their own songs from home, refugees and exiles can retain a sense of their own, familiar culture and tradition, and of belonging to a certain part of the world. Similarly, in group work in a multicultural nation like South Africa, there are a few songs that all groups know, which can create a bonding effect for the group. Conversely, if a group begins a song that is highly cul-

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ture-specific – like a more obscure Xhosa song in a group made of up four or five different ethnic groups – then the group experiences ‘exclusion’ rather than ‘inclusiveness’. So – how do we choose music for groups? First of all, you need to think about whether you, as group leader, can really think about selecting music for group listening before you have a sense of who 1 group members are. I’d like to suggest that especially in early stages of longer-term group listening work, it may be useful to ask group members to bring their own music, and to share with the group why they have selected a particular piece of music. This can be a way of gaining some insight and familiarity with folks’ musical culture, which can then inform your own choices for listening for that group. Below are some examples drawn from a group whose members are taking turns at presenting their musical biographies: an excellent way of getting a feel for people’s musical tastes, and of introducing themselves to the rest of the group. Each vignette signals different kinds of meanings – usually generated by the way the person talks about the piece they have chosen.

12.2a Prescribed meaning Vignette 12c Carla2 tells us a fable to do with an old monk’s unrequited love for a beautiful woman;a love that he expresses in designing beautiful cathedrals throughout Europe. After his death, she finds one of his letters instructing her to sit in one of his buildings and listen to a specific piece of music, which will ‘speak’ to her of his feelings towards her. The music that Carla plays us is an extract from Mozart’s Horn Concerto.

Most of the group know this music, but the content of Carla’s story imbues the group’s listening with specific images. The group imagines the beautiful woman alone in a cathedral, the music echoing through the gallery, and barely hear the Horn Concerto as that. Or as anything else. The group’s listening is tightly 1

Here, obviously I am not thinking of Guided Imagery in Music which, as touched on very briefly, is a highly specialized field of music therapy and music listening, based on many years of research and analysis of clients’ responses. In GIM, generally it is the therapist that chooses.

2

All names have been altered to protect privacy.

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guided and prescribed by Carla’s story, and the music becomes almost a mysterious message, to be decoded. This is an example of how introducing a piece of music can focus the way that folk will listen and think about the music, not unlike the practice of visualization, in which listening is guided by words spoken before or during the listening – rather similar to the programme notes of a concert programme, and to the Western tradition of programmatic music. Vignette 12d Sally is in her early twenties, and has selected one song to ‘make a statement ’ about her life,since she does not feel that her life has been in sequential ‘stages’. The words of the song, she explains, portray something of her love of animals, her spiritual life, her close and happy family life and also her life as a student.

We listen to the words of the song, which are indeed about life being a mystery and a journey. None of the group has listened to the music. The words say it all. A similar point can be made here, in the sense that lyrics can dominate the listener’s attention, and in selecting songs (rather than instrumental music) for public occasions, the content of words needs careful thought. In each of these two instances, the music carries a specific message. Both meanings are literal: Sally’s song presents verbal and referential meaning – so that the listeners do not necessarily ‘need’ to decode the meaning of the music; and, in fact, they do not ‘need’ the music at all. Carla’s story carries a message of love – which although not literally spelled out in the music, is created by the preamble to the music-listening. For the listeners, it is rather difficult to disassociate the music from the story, although here we need to be careful: this association may be unconvincing for some listeners, who may lose interest in the music.

12.2b Episodic meaning Vignette 12e Heather chooses to present her life in four stages. Childhood is a happy time with much fun, laughter and playfulness. She plays an extract from Peter and the Wolf sung in her native tongue. We laugh as we listen to the music’s light humour. She then plays an excerpt from The Four Seasons to symbolize her last years at school, which were structured,predictable and socially safe,with her friends and social life.

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The next piece of music is heavy rock – it has a hard, head-butting quality. This, she tells us, is about her loneliness during her gap-year in a small English village, where she knew nobody and felt alienated and acutely uncomfortable socially. She is now an undergraduate university student, which she experienced, at first, as a vast, fluid world, where she’s had to find and create her own social structure. She plays a soft melodic rock song that, she says, is about her feelings that life as a student is friendly and flowing. Here we have ‘episodic’ associations. The music chosen has meanings for Heather by having coincided – literally – with a certain part of her life: the fun, light childhood years; the safe, predictable school years; the lonely isolation, and more recently, the fluidity of being a student. Presumably she also heard and listened to other music at any of these phases of her life, but these others were not the choices she made to bring to the group.

12.2c Grammatical meaning Susan, a group member, talks of finding Prokofieff ’s Peter and the Wolf music delightful: complex, lyrical, unexpected and brilliantly orchestrated. She is a violonist, and has assimilated skills to do with recognizing grammatical virtuosity. At the same time, she says that the Four Seasons is a ‘turn-off ’. She finds it simplistic and repetitive, predictable – and cannot understand why it is such a popular piece. Here we see someone who is skilled at reading and decoding musical grammar, and whose enjoyment of music is based on the structural content and relationships within music. Music that has become too familiar – as music psychology has shown – loses its power to arouse our interest; similarly, music that is too complicated structurally, or too simple, also fails to sustain our interest. In the first instance we lose interest because we cannot ‘make sense’ of it; while in the latter, we lose interest because we already ‘know how it works’. 12.2d Direct meaning When Heather was presenting her music, she mentioned that she recently reheard the hard rock music – her third musical choice in the vignette above – on the radio while doing something else. She had not been listening attentively to the radio, but became aware of a hard tight knot in her stomach (and holds her tummy as she says this to us). This feeling in her tummy shifted her attention to the radio, and she now found herself ‘listening’ rather than ‘hearing’ the

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music. The act of listening re-evoked her physical and emotional sensations of that time. Here is what musicologists call an indexical experience: where music affects us immediately and viscerally, apparently bypassing our grammatical understanding of it. As well as being the result of direct visceral impact, this kind of response may be also based on episodic associations: Heather was unhappy when first she heard that music, and on rehearing it, she re-experiences physical symptoms to do with that time and place.

12.2e Iconic and symbolic meaning Vignette 12f Paula opens with a fast, shifting movement from a Bach Brandenburg Concerto.This reminds her of her busy frenetic life as a student activist at university and high school, where she was forever juggling three or four different lives at the same time. As a social worker, she did an internship in an isolated rural community, which she found very difficult as a woman and as an educated person. She lost her voice for some weeks while she was there (literally could not speak) – and felt it to be symbolic of losing her voice as a woman and as a professional. She plays us a recording of exquisite improvised organ music to symbolize her loss of voice, explaining to us that she usually associates organ music with singing in church.Now as a professional woman engaged in vibrant, busy and challenging work, she has a sense of various threads of her life being drawn together. She plays a recording of the Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Gabarek: the mixture of voices and the saxophone are an image of the complex drawing together of her life’s threads.

Here is music whose internal qualities reflect the forms and qualities of life itself, which musicologists call iconic meaning: in other words, we recognize something in the music as resembling – in this case – Paula’s descriptions, because of the similarity of form between them. The fast shifting Bach portrays the fast shifting threads of her life, while the complex musical textures of the Garbarek recording portray the complicated threads of her life. However, there is more to the music’s meaning than a reflection of her life. Paula also selects music that has symbolic meaning. Here, the organ music symbolizes a time of her life when she ‘lost her voice’, but had Paula not told the group this, nothing in the music itself would have conveyed her ‘loss of voice’. The form of the

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organ music does not resemble someone without a voice, in the way that the Brandenburg movement resembles the form of the quick shifting busy-ness of Paula’s life.

12.2f Episodic meaning and associations for listeners Vignette 12g Finally, Jake plays us the first movement of Dvorjak’s New World Symphony – which he heard at the time of his mother’s death. It was playing on the radio, and this piece of music has always reminded him of that time of her life. More recently, he heard this work at a concert, performed by the youth orchestra in which his daughter plays the violin. Jake speaks of having enjoyed the youthfulness of the players, and of feeling great pride in his daughter. It was only long after the concert,when he was going to sleep that he remembered that this was the piece of music that he had always associated with his mother’s death.

This is similar to Heather’s reasons for selecting her music: there is a coincidental and synchronous coming together of that piece of music and the time of his mother’s death, that imbued this piece of music with specific meaning for him. At the same time, the meaning is shifting for him: another episodic coincidence, this time of his daughter performing the work, imbues this piece with a different meaning for him, so that in the future, the New World will have more than one set of meanings. Jake’s experience as listener at a symphony concert prompts a group discussion about the pieces of music. Someone in the group says that the New World Symphony was one of his first orchestral experiences as a music student. As he was listening to it, he recalled that time of his life, and remembered suddenly that a student friend from that time was gravely ill. He had forgotten to call her family, and now felt a sense of guilt and urgency to act upon remembering to call her. Carla concurs with Susan’s comments about the Four Seasons having become rather a bore, so that while listening, she found herself not hearing the music at all, but rather, listening to her own thoughts about family friends whose youngest is ill with leukaemia. The thought came to her that this young child was in the ‘fourth season’ of her life, as her illness turned the child into an older person.

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At this point I want to divert, to think more closely about how we might prepare a ‘listening exercise’ for a group. This exercise is not about ‘teaching’ a group to listen to musical grammar or musical structure, but rather about providing an opportunity for the group to ‘play’ with their imaginations as they listen to music, and create their personal meaning. Also, this exercise is unusual in this book, since it describes a step-by-step procedure. See if it is useful for you.

12.3 Divertimento: A listening exercise Again I want to stress that this exercise is not to be confused with Guided Imagery in Music, which is a specific music therapy discipline that needs an intensive specialized training. Here, rather, I am presenting an exercise that I have found useful with groups of children, adolescents and adults in getting them to think about music. This exercise can be useful for a new group whose members are getting to know one another. I have also used it with young children – although here I would use only one piece of music, and provide crayons for them to draw pictures about the music while listening (as could adults). It is also useful with musicians and music students to get them to listen to music in a personal rather than musical way. I have also used this exercise as team-building work, with staff groups. As group leader, listen to the quality of energy in the room as each piece of music is played. When I did this exercise recently, with the Gospel music and Billy Joel, the energy in the room shot up: people wriggled, laughed and exclaimed. With both the Corsican and the Japanese music, there was an intense listening and concentration, and with the Mozambican and the Arab-Jewish music, the listening was quiet and ‘softer’. Again I want to stress the need to adapt the choice of music for each group – with this particular instance, the exercise was under a general heading to do with ‘The Music of our Culture’, hence the culturally diverse music. Much of this chapter has been about listening to music – whether live, at a concert, or recorded. I now want to consider how, as group musicians, we might help with choosing music for social events, such as funerals, weddings, farewells, welcomes and other ‘social rites’ that might need our input. Because of the substantial discussions we’ve had on musical meanings so far, I shall make this very brief.

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1. What you need • A good quality sound system/CD player • A selection of CDs • A watch with a second hand or a stop watch • Each person needs paper and pen (or crayons)

2. Setting the scene Explain to the group that you are going to play five pieces of music for 90 seconds. As they listen, you want them to answer the following questions: (best to write these on a board to prevent anyone interrupting the exercise) 1.

What does the music remind you of ?

2.

How does the music make you feel?

They have about a minute in between the bits of music to write their thoughts.

3. Doing the exercise You then play each piece of music, keeping time on your second hand. (I find using a stop watch better, as I often forget where the second hand of my watch is when the music begins.) Do keep strict time! This is part of keeping the group focused. Also, do call out the number of each piece that you are playing – and do NOT tell the group what music you are playing. (Call the pieces numbers 1, 2, 3, etc.) 4. Sharing in small groups Now invite folk to get into pairs or groups of three or four (depending on the size of the group), and get folk to share their experiences. Ask that each group (say there are five groups) elects one person to take notes, and another to ‘report back’ when we do the

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whole group. They have 20 minutes to go through all five pieces of music. (You might also suggest that each small group starts with discussing a different piece to ensure that you get through all the music: thus group 1 could begin with no.1; group 2 with no. 2, and so on, and then work their way down the list.)

5. Sharing with the whole group Each group then speaks about their experience of the music. Here, best to let each group talk about a different piece (e.g. the piece that they discussed first), otherwise this can take a long time. 6. Musical examples It is important that you select music that ‘feels right’ for each time you do this exercise. This is the list of music I played when I did this exercise most recently, some 10 days ago – with a group of adult NGO workers who were culturally very mixed: • Mozambican vocal and instrumental music (very warm and tender) • Corsican religious music (male voices a cappella, rather sombre) • Billy Joel’s ‘My Life’ (lively, loud, insistent rock) • Arab-Jewish folk music (instrumental, energetic and tightly woven) • African Gospel (mass choral music, repetitive and increasing in intensity) • Japanese court music (instrumental, suspended sounds, little rhythmic energy)

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12.4 Musical choices for social rites When helping to plan music for a social ritual, whether alone or with a group of friends, colleagues or family members, we need to remember that the choice of music may be informed by a range of meanings – at least as many meanings as there are people involved in the planning. Here is one example, with a very brief commentary. Vignette 12h A dear friend has died, and four of us are planning the funeral service with the local vicar.After much discussion and remembering,we settle on what we think was her favourite hymn; a song that best says something about her sparkling personality (The Carpenters’ ‘Top of the World’); an instrumental arrangement from her country of origin (Central European folk music) and a traditional hymn (Psalm 23).

Some of this music needs to be traditional in the wider social sense, and accessible to the entire group: most of the folk attending the funeral will know Psalm 23, which means that they can participate in the event by singing the hymn. However, an event such as this brings together people who may know each other very slightly, and we want the music to be meaningful to them. Something about the reasons for choosing the music needs to be printed in the Order of Service, and the person conducting the service might also say something about each piece of music before it is played. This can help to focus the congregation on the music, and on the person whose life is being mourned and celebrated.

12.5 Closing notes This chapter began with a live concert performance that was exhilarating. Despite not necessarily understanding the musical grammar or structure, this exciting collective event was socially meaningful, both collectively and individually. It gave those in the audience a sense of belonging to the experience. We then looked at another social rite – that of Evensong, which ‘ought’ to have given us a similar (though possibly a little quieter) sense of belonging, and that, instead, seemed to propel us away from one another, amplifying the differences between the sub-groups in the congregation. Each of these personal experiences will, inevitably, become associated with the music that was being played at the time, so that whenever I hear Nusrat Ali Khan’s music I am delighted with

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the memories of that event. For some, the anthems sung at Keble College Chapel may evoke less happy associations: to do with being outside the group. We then considered listening to pre-recorded music, and the range of meanings that various musical pieces held for each person listening. Finally we considered how to use music to create imaginative and personal meaning, in a group context. All of this suggests that choosing music for listening is complicated, to say the least. Here I need to declare my suspicion of CD compilations entitled ‘Soothe your soul’ or ‘Calm your road rage’. Who on earth can say with such precision, what the effects of particular pieces of music will be? And when? And why? I’d like to end by suggesting that there is only one rule when choosing music for listening in group work: listen to the quality of energy in the room when your group listens to music – it will tell you volumes about the group’s experience.

CHAPTER 13

Team Building and Conflict Resolution Things can and do go spectacularly wrong within music groups – and sometimes even before you begin. As community musician, music therapist or music facilitator, you need to be on the ball and alert to what is going on to prevent flops and save you flipping. That is the good news. The less good news is that at times, the flops have an annoying way of arriving unsolicited and unnoticed until it is ‘too late’. This chapter provides two aspects of ‘flopping’: one to do with what can ‘go wrong’ inside and during your music groups; and the other to do with how (as a consultant) you might use music in order to address problems that a group has already identified and decided needs ‘fixing’. Since much of these two themes are already addressed in various parts of this book, this chapter is more of a focusing moment, providing a conceptual frame for thinking about ‘what kind of things’ might sabotage or undermine or destroy your work, and how you begin to reflect on this. In this sense, this last chapter in Part II is a bridge between ‘executing’ and ‘reflecting’ in Part III of this book.

13.1 What kind of flops? Part I of this book, to do with planning your group work, states explicitly that you need to have put proper ‘structures’ in place before beginning your work with a group. In other words, you need proper briefing by your employers/ funders/managers; you need to inform yourself about the institutional structures, flows of information and reporting and then, you, as group leader, need to ‘brief ’ the group members properly about the remit of your work together through setting up the group contract and group norms. However, even with all of this in place, things can ‘go wrong’. A number of vignettes throughout this book describe moments that ‘don’t work’ and reflect

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on what it is that has not worked, what’s gone wrong, and how you might think about addressing this. In this section, then, I present brief vignettes that illustrate some common causes for things ‘going wrong’. Incidentally these are ‘real life’ vignettes told to me by community workers, and used with their permission although names and identities are disguised.

13.2 In- and out-groups Vignette 13a A local church becomes known for its lively musical services. They’ve recently started a music service on Sunday nights, with a small committed group of musicians preparing and rehearsing the music for each Sunday. The increased Sunday evening attendance testifies to the music’s popularity.The music group notices that very few members of the congregation sing during the services, so they set about making sure that there is a bit of time for rehearsing the songs before the service proper begins. After some months, the congregations begins complaining about the music being ‘too loud’, and present a memo to the parish council. The music group ‘leader’ conveys this to the music group members, who begin playing much quieter music. Still nobody joins in the singing,and more complaints are put forward to the parish council. Eventually the music group leader resigns his post. The music group continues leading the services for some weeks,and then one by one the members leave the parish. A year later, that church is no longer known for its lively music-making. In fact, the services are pretty run of the mill.

Here we have a ‘core’ group of dedicated musicians who put a lot of time and effort into preparing the music for the Sunday evening service. Neither they nor the parish council (to whom the music group is accountable), thought to make clear to the congregation how and why the music group was being set up, although on the face of it, everyone thought this was a good idea, confirmed by the increased attendances on Sunday evenings. However, as time goes by, another ‘core’ group emerges on Sunday evenings: regular attenders who begin to feel that their commitment to attending the service is not being acknowledged. They begin to feel as though the music group is the ‘in-group’

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and, by default, they are ‘out’. The result is a complaint about ‘the music being too loud’, which the parish council takes ‘at face value’. And so on.

13.3 Sticking to the plan Vignette 13b As a consultant contracted to do ‘stress-management’ with a group of medical doctors,I have prepared a session that begins with a warm-up: tossing a ball of wool between members and unravelling it in order to eventually create a ‘web’ of wool between group members. As each person catches the ball of wool they say their names and how they’re feeling, before throwing it onto the next person. The atmosphere is thick with discomfort, and I plod on relentlessly, feeling increasingly stressed and tense: I have planned this as my ‘ice-breaker’ before moving on to a musical activity. When everyone has had a chance to say their name, I ask that the ball of wool be passed back to me, and promptly drop it on to the floor. As I pick it up, I make a comment that ‘dropping’ the ball of wool seems to be the perfect comment on this activity that has clearly ‘flopped’. There is a burst of laughter in the group, and immediately I feel a sense of relief. I then say that perhaps this is a good example of how ‘not’ to start a group. There is more laughter, and from then onwards, the session flows more easily.

I was so certain that this plan would work that I didn’t bother to ‘revise’ it. As consultant, I am used to working with many different groups, and this has worked in the past. At times you have to ditch your prepared plans – no matter how carefully prepared – and be totally present in the moment. Enough said.

13.4 Who’s in charge? Vignette 13c Martha is facilitating an afternoon in-service training with a group of fifteen music teachers. She’s been called in to teach them some Zulu songs and dances, since most of the teachers were trained before the time when Zulu was recognized as one of the ‘official languages’ of South Africa. After her briefing with an official at the Department of Education,she has prepared five songs that the teachers will find useful

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in their work with primary school children. The workshop begins with introductions, and Martha then uses an overhead projector to show the teachers what songs they’ll be doing in the afternoon. As they begin working with one of the songs, one of the teachers, Mrs F, says to the group that she has used this song often in her class, and it works very well. The way that she uses it is with certain dance steps (which she then demonstrates to the group). Some of the other teachers begin imitating her dance steps and Martha feels the session slipping away from her. Some of us know this scenario very well indeed. Someone in the group – Mrs F – is not happy with the fact that they are ‘not in charge’ and lets us know it. In this group, Mrs F is powerful and persuasive enough to ‘pull the group’ along with her. Here is an ‘anti-group’ scenario (see Chapter 18). Mrs F is voicing what is already present and unstated in the group, which explains why she very quickly mobilizes enough of the other teachers to sabotage Martha’s workshop. If Martha had negotiated norms with the group at the beginning of her workshop, this might have been different! Part of the norms could have included something about the fact that some teachers might know some of the songs – in which case, Martha is happy to have some contributions, after they have first all done the song together in the way that she has prepared it. It should be possible for Martha to reflect on this event (and read this book!) – which will prevent this happening again. If not, the risks are that she feels undermined, and goes home very despondent after the session. She will also experience terrific anxiety and stress before doing her next workshop, which that group will sense. The result will not be a happy one for anyone in that workshop – or for Martha’s future as a consultant.

13.5 Who’s running this show? Vignette 13d It is the weekly choir practice, and James is stressed. There are only two rehearsals to go before the year-end concert, and Class 11C is playing up. They mutter under their breaths instead of getting on with the instrumental arrangements he has written for the Finale, complaining that ‘this is childish’. As a well trained Community Arts worker, James has been careful to prepare a programme that respects the children’s ages. He’s at the end of his tether, and goes to see his

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manager for some advice. Dr White has been away on sabbatical, and this is the first time James has had a chance to meet with her in six months. At the end of the consultation, James realizes that it is not the music that irks the children, but the instruments he has chosen. Dr White quickly spotted this in their consultation, and suggests to James that he asks the children for their opinions. James asks the class 11C teacher for some time with the class, and sure enough, the children vociferously let him know that he’s ‘messed up’.Luckily for James,Dr White has pre-empted this in their consultation and he manages not to take offence. Instead, he and the children have a session with the larger instruments, and together more or less rearrange the music. The end-of year concert is a success, with Class 11C especially commended by the head of the school. A happy ending. Find a mentor! You cannot always see what is ‘really’ going on in your sessions, whereas someone who is sympathetic and supportive, without necessarily seeing things only from your point of view, may very quickly spot the difficulty. You could save yourself an awful lot of stress and sleepless nights. I don’t for a minute pretend that this is all that can ‘go wrong’ in music group sessions. However, in each of the examples I offer a clue as to the underlying cause of the ‘problem’. At times, if you can spot the problem – which may have little to do with what is actually going on – you’re well on the way to addressing it.

13.6 Think before the group flops This section considers what ‘flops’ do to you as group leader: if you can manage to be honest and self-critical (without being self-destructive or feeling too sorry for yourself ), this is a good beginning for taking a detached look at how you might begin to ‘repair’ flops without ‘flipping’. Once again, I present brief points. •

Feel undermined. Poor Martha, in the vignette above, is left feeling totally undermined. Her self-esteem and confidence have plummeted. Critically, though, Martha was not a skilled enough facilitator to have set in place structures that would prevent this kind of event from happening in the first place. Don’t make the same mistake. Re-read Chapter 3 to remind yourself of group norms, and how Martha might go about negotiating these with – admittedly – a difficult group.

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Become more controlling. If a group feels out of control (especially children or adolescents, or if you work in a context in which ‘discipline’ is emphasized), the temptation is to ‘take control’. The difficulty is this: in the moment of the group ‘flopping’ you are likely to feel angry with the group (and with yourself), and also ‘out of control’. The session feels as though it is falling apart. In a class situation, you may have the opportunity of demanding that the disruptive child or children leave the classroom. I am not sure that this is always helpful in the longer term, although in the short term it will quieten the class and a sense of order is restored. My experience of doing this in music therapy class sessions is that it undermines trust between myself and the children – but there are times when you don’t have the energy, you may be feeling fragile or unwell, and this is certainly a short-term solution. Once again, though, this needs to be part of the ‘norms’ set up between you and the group: if anyone is disruptive, then they leave the group.

•

Feel angry and helpless. Martha can hardly ask Mrs F to ‘leave’ the workshop. Her own feelings are very loud at the moment: she feels angry with Mrs F for ‘showing her up’, and also angry with herself for not being more assertive. She feels helpless and wishes the end of the session to come as soon as possible.

•

Be assertive. If you’re on your toes, you may have the wherewithal to assert yourself (rather than take control). Even without setting norms at the beginning, Martha could have made it clear – tactfully and firmly – to Mrs F that actually, she, Martha, had some other ideas, and perhaps at the end of the workshop there would be time for others to show their ideas and techniques. This would have reasserted Martha’s role as facilitator, and probably enabled the session to proceed more smoothly for everyone. Incidentally, some members of the group will be aware of Martha’s feelings of helplessness, and feel uncomfortable. They may not be assertive enough to ‘say’ anything to counteract Mrs F’s sabotage. In other words, a ‘flop’ is a flop for everyone – not just for Martha.

•

Become depressed and feel paralysed. With the medical doctors I felt totally incompetent and began to feel trapped, paralysed and depressed, with no clue as to how to ‘get out of’ the situation. Luckily for me, an inadvertent slip – both of the ball of wool and of

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the tongue – resulted in my making a comment about everything being a flop. This provoked the group into laughter and the group energy shifted. I was lucky. And inexperienced. •

Feel attacked and want to flee. The leader of the church music group begins to feel attacked by the parish council and the congregation. In the end he resigns – all of this has eroded his energy and passion for the music group. This is a shame!

I hope that, as a result of reading this book, you will not find yourself in these kinds of situations, because you’ll be able to prevent things from ‘flopping’ and read the signs very early on. Let’s now look at a scenario where you’re called in, as community musician, music therapist or group facilitator, by a group that has already identified that it has a problem, and you are ‘Madam Fix-it’. The two vignettes are from ‘real-life’ scenarios.

13.7 Whose conflict is this? Vignette 13e I’ve been asked as a consultant to do a half-day session with a staff group from a local school. The brief is as follows: it is the end of the year and the teachers are exhausted. There are a lot of ‘personality clashes’ in the group, and the head teacher feels that I might do some ‘conflict resolution’ work with them. I suggest rather that we call my session ‘team building’, since I am clear that a half-day one-off session is certainly not going to solve conflicts – or even necessarily unearth them. The head teacher and I set clear boundaries of time, place and fee.I explain that I need some art materials,and fax through a list.I also ask her to make clear to the teachers that they are to be punctual,and that the session will begin at 09h00 and end at 12h30.I ask everyone to wear loose comfortable clothing, and to bring floor cushions, as we will do some work sitting on the floor. On the appointed day I walk past the staff-room and hear a group chatting loudly and smoking.I have a feeling of anxiety,especially as it is pouring with rain, and I had planned to send the group outside at various points of the morning. Finally we are seated in a circle at the appointed time. Everyone is there bar one person, and again I have a feeling of anxiety and am

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uncertain as to how long to wait. I voice my uncertainty, asking the teachers how long we should wait for the missing person. ‘She’s always late’ comes the unhelpful reply. We agree to give her five more minutes, and then begin our session. We go round the group each introducing ourselves and saying something of our expectations about the morning. There is a feeling of negativity in the group, as well as rather a lot of anger and frustration which seems to be directed at the missing member of staff. Almost at the end of the introductions, the door flies open and a rather flushed, dishevelled woman pours into the room, apologizing profusely and explaining that she had to go to the garage because her car was leaking oil, she was locked out of the house, the cat was ill and a string of other reasons. Some of the teachers in the group roll their eyes. I feel tense. This vignette describes Act I, scene 1. There is lots of trouble ahead and, critically, I keep tabs on all the signals all the way through the morning. This group is in no mood for being ‘nice’ either to one another or to me; and I know that I need to begin with something very gentle and unthreatening, that avoids them having to do too much work with one another. I decide, on the spot, to begin with a relaxation and visualization exercise. Vignette 13f Everyone is lying on the floor,and I have my stop watch in my left hand, my prompt sheet in my right hand. I have three CDs in the shuttle. For the relaxation part of the exercise I play the slow movement of an Albinoni oboe concerto. I have timed my text according to the length of the movement, with time markers in the left column of my text. I keep track of time with my stop watch as I gently speak through the physical relaxation. After seven minutes, the CD switches to the Pachelbel canon, and I continue with the relaxation, still keeping close track of time, and begin to talk the group towards a visualization exercise. By the end of the visualization, there is a deep stillness in the room, and I gently bring the group back into the present, inviting them to get some paper and crayons,and do an image of their visualization.I forbid them to speak unless they need help with the art materials. I give them 20 minutes to do their image,during which time I slowly and quietly walk around the room. I am fully present to the moment, and

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aware of the feeling of peace in the room – very different from the beginning of the morning. Had I taken this group straight into anything that involved talking or interacting with one another, I would most likely have been asking for trouble. The group would have either scapegoated the late-comer (who I gathered was already the group scapegoat), or else they would have attacked me. Neither would have been helpful for anyone. Instead, I take control from the start. I am directive and prescriptive, describe the exercise we are about to do very clearly and calmly, also state the time frame, and then begin. The group responds, and off we go. What’s critical here is that I have the presence of mind to change my plan of action on the spot. Had I continued with my planned ‘ice-breaker’ (for instance the wool ball throwing exercise), the group would probably have very quickly used this as a platform to ridicule one another and me; and from there it is difficult to recover some kind of trusting equilibrium. In contrast, with the relaxation and the visualization exercise the group feels emotionally held by me, by the structure I am providing, by the activity and by the music. Also, each is alone with their thoughts which, at this stage, they are not asked to share with one another. Vignette 13g At the end of the 20 minutes it is time for the 30-minute tea-break which we negotiated as part of the norm setting. The atmosphere in the room is relaxed, and there is an air of industry with everyone absorbed in their imaging task. I request that they take tea in silence and, since it has stopped raining, I also ask that they go outside and each bring back an ‘object’ from outside after tea.I explain that the object might be a stone,a twig, flower or leaf – anything that catches their eye as they walk outside in the magnificent grounds. During the tea-break I sit alone in the room,gathering my thoughts. I decide to take the group through a second visualization, this time to include the object that they each bring back after tea-break. Since this is unplanned,I quickly go through my CDs,make a note of the length of the two excerpts I have chosen, and make a few points about how the music-visualization might work.

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The group returns, sits in a circle, and I explain that I want them to put their first image aside, and that we will do a second visualization that includes their object. Again I ask them to get some paper and make sure that they have enough art materials. They need not lie down this time if they don’t want to, but need to sit comfortably with their eyes closed. I use the tea-break to reflect on how the first half of the morning has gone, and to plan the second half. I realize that we will not use the musical instruments I have brought, neither, most likely, will we do any voice work. My intuition is to continue with the visualization and the personal imaging. During tea-break, I also make a note of the time frame, since I want to leave 45 minutes for a group reflection plus 15 minutes to evaluate the morning by 12h30. Vignette 13h At the end of the second visualization and image making, the floor is covered in artwork. I now invite the group to form a pair with the person next to them, and to spend 15 minutes or so telling one another about their images. I listen closely to the ‘feeling’ of the sounds in the room as folk talk: there is a quiet relaxed hum, which gives me a clue that the group is ready for a shared group reflection. While they talk, I clear a space in the middle of the floor. At the end of 15 minutes, all are seated on the floor with the art work in front of us. We begin the last part of the session, in which I invite folk to share their thoughts about their images with the rest of the group. Once they have finished their sharing, they are to put their images in the space that I have made in the centre of the circle. I also explain that not everyone needs to speak. Some may prefer not speaking, and only placing their images in the centre. This we will respect as a group – which incidentally we also negotiated at the beginning of the morning. Everyone speaks and places their images in the centre. At the end, we stand in a circle, looking at what has become a ‘shrine’. I play some music while we stand silently and look at our morning’s work. I am aware of one person in tears.

Giving folk an option not to ‘speak’, so long as they take part in some way, is important. This needs to be negotiated as part of the norms right at the

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beginning of the session. Also, by now I have a sense that the group is far more gentle and relaxed, and that folk are more likely to share openly with one another. This they do, and the session ends with a long and moving silence. Vignette 13i We close the morning with a 15-minute evaluation. The group is astonished at what they have produced. They speak of feeling energized and relaxed, and incredulous that only a few hours ago they felt exhausted and fractious – indeed some had stated at the beginning that they didn’t quite know what they were doing there.Some folk say that they have learnt things about one another which, in all the years they have worked together, they have not known. A week later I receive a warm ‘thank-you’ card from the head teacher,asking whether I would be prepared to do a follow-up session, at the request of the teachers.

This story has a happy ending. But this is no coincidence. I was totally focused and alert as to what the group was saying and not saying, the general atmosphere in the room and, critically, I was ready to totally change my plans. Even though getting all the instruments out of my studio, into the car and then down the long school corridors had been time consuming, to say the least, this was no reason to use them. A group improvisation would have been catastrophic! I was able to read the signs very early on – in fact, I listened to my feeling of anxiety as I walked past the staff-room, before even having met the staff. That feeling ‘told me’ something about the staff – I’d been looking forward to the session and feeling relaxed and energized on my way to the school. I listened to my feelings, and remained extremely alert. As a result, the group had an experience that enabled them to reconnect with one another in another way. You might say that I ‘ignored’ the conflict and possibly ‘avoided’ it. I am not so sure that confronting it would have been that helpful: it sounded as though the group had, in any case, become ‘stuck’ in a loop of interacting, confirmed by the group’s reaction when the ‘latecomer’ arrived. I saw their reactions and sensed the feelings of hostility in the room. This told me plenty. I knew that I had to assert myself as ‘leader’, and provide a structured morning’s activities that would enable each person to spend some time with themselves. At the same time as acting in a prescriptive and directive manner, I was focused on the undercurrents and, as a consequence, changed my plan. The group, however, knew nothing of my change of plans. However, they

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possibly sensed my responsiveness to their need, their exhaustion and their dynamic – and certainly the warm thank-you card suggests that they experienced group musicking as bonding and holding.

13.8 Building bridges Groups are enormously complex, to put it mildly, and I could fill this chapter with dozens more stories, some less happy than this one. The main thing is to be on your toes! Trust your intuitions, and have Plans A, B, C and – if possible – D up your sleeve. Also, remember that generally, one-off group sessions can be hellishly difficult, and you, as the outsider, are likely to get the full vent of the group’s hidden feelings. I did not address or resolve the conflict in this staff group, and I am not sure that it would have been responsible of me to say that this is what I would do, in my initial briefing with the head of the school. Instead, I decided to focus on ‘growing’ the group: it was end of term, folk were tired, this was a one-off session, and I needed to be realistic. These strategies worked.

PART III

Reflecting: Thinking Back and Forth

Part III of this book is hardly ‘last’ in terms of sequence. I remind you that, in one sense, this entire text is about Reflecting, whether we reflect during our planning, while we’re executing, or after we’re ‘done’. What is distinctive about this section, though, is that a lot of this section has to do with what we need to ‘hold in mind’ during our planning and executing. In other words, not all of these reflections impact directly on how you ‘do’, but rather, may impact on how you ‘think about’ what you do. Chapter 14 ‘How Formed is Your Listening?’, uses aspects of music psychology to think about the form and structure of the group’s musicking, while ‘Persons as Music’ (Chapter 15) draws from the psychology of non-verbal communication to reflect on communicative and innate musicality – which impacts on how we play, listen to and experience music. In Chapter 16, I revisit ‘Group Music, Identity and Society’, which is in one sense the theme of this book; while Chapter 17 thinks about the kinds of absence and presence you might experience, during your sessions, from and between different members. Chapter 18 presents aspects of group process, drawing from group theory and psychodynamic thinking. Finally, I set rather a bad example in leaving ‘Evaluating and Ending’ to be the last chapter of this book, since evaluating and monitoring your work needs to happen all the time. Some of these chapters have direct links with chapters in Part I and II of this book, so that you might want to move – and think – back and forth between each section.

CHAPTER 14

How Formed is Your Listening? (and How Informed is Your Speaking?) This brief chapter – the first of Part III – draws from the huge field of psychology of perception and cognition to consider how we might ‘talk about’ the musical information in group music, leaving aside, for the moment, the personal and interpersonal nuances of group work. Also, this discussion applies equally to all kinds of music-making and music-listening. Whereas Chapter 5 considered musical form and musical structure in terms of ‘planning’ a group musical activity, and its impact on musical and group roles, this chapter reflects on – and talks about – more fundamental mental processes, using an explicitly musical discourse. This is to help you consider how you might talk about the music in your groups. This is no simple matter, when we consider that we’re using language-based concepts to explain music-making, which is – after all – not a language-based medium.

14.1 Making sense of music: Listening to ‘Greensleeves’ Multiple mental mechanisms are engaged in listening, absorbing and making sense of music when we play and when we listen to it. The field of perceptual psychology clarifies that we generally distinguish between foreground and background in our sensory environment (whether visual or auditory). This distinction enables us to perceive perspective in terms of distance and nearness, in space and time, and also helps our senses to ‘make sense of ’ the world around us. When listening to a piece of music – let’s say a (fairly un-complex) orchestral arrangement of ‘Greensleeves’ – we hear the melody in the foreground perceptually, while we hear the harmonies, instrumental textures and rhythmic patterns as being in the background. At the same time as our attention monitors the foreground, background and the shifting relationship between the two, 175

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we’re constantly ‘making sense’ of the music through cognitive processes. These cognitive processes enable us to track the various melodies, harmonic progressions and nuances, instrumental textures, and compare these with our existing ‘information store’ of musical styles, rhythmic or harmonic progressions, orchestral textures, and so on. This ‘store’ of information is not a static volume or container of knowledge, but is itself revised as we ‘receive’ and process ‘new’ musical information with our existing store of knowledge. This brief description of listening to ‘Greensleeves’ suggests that listening is a highly participative act. Even though this is a gross simplification of how we begin to make sense of music, you have some idea of the complexity of juggling with various sensory, mental and emotional competencies, apparently effortlessly, as we listen to music. Let’s now look very briefly at the basis of perceptual mechanisms: i.e. how we make sense of the stimuli in the world around us.

14.2 Grouping principles: Basic percepts Gestalt psychology has clarified that the fundamental mechanism of perception is that of perceptual grouping. We have innate mental mechanisms that enable us to perceive a collection of events (whether visual or aural) as grouped, rather than remaining a collection of events: this means that we are able to see a visual pattern – say a line – rather than a collection of dots. Grouping happens on the basis of similarity (we group together what we perceive as similar), proximity (we group together what is clustered together), good continuity (we tend towards creating a unified whole), and closure (we complete an incomplete or partially complete shape or form).

Figure 14.1 Grouping: Similarity and difference

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While looking at Figure 14.1, do you see a random collection of symbols? Unlikely. Most of us tend to immediately place these symbols into some kind of pattern, and are likely to see five vertical lines. Our brains instantly group together what ‘belongs’ together, on the basis of similarity. At the same time, the principle of good continuity ensures that we see lines or columns, and that, if we take a more global look, we see a rectangle: here is the principle of closing. As you look, you’re also grouping together the symbols using the similarity of space as well as the similarity of the symbols themselves, to make sense of this collection of visual events. What emerges are patterns – of four lines, of a rectangle, of columns – which you immediately create as you look, using a combination of these perceptual mechanisms. If we think of patterns (in general) as abstract mental concepts, then by recognizing these and transferring them across contexts and senses, we exercise cognitive economy, and are able to process information in our environment that much more accurately and quickly. Most of us recognize a circle, whether it is drawn on a piece of paper, the shape of the peppermint we’re being offered, the shape of a sleeper earring, the traffic roundabout and when we see children playing ring-a-ring-a-rosie. These principles and mechanisms of patterning apply to music: in playing and listening to music, whether pre-composed or improvised, we constantly group, regroup and create and extend, develop and adapt multiple patterns of melody, rhythm, harmony, phrasing in our minds. This mental processing of musical information enables us to hear the foreground and background of the music, and impacts on how we listen to the next bit of music, in relation to what we’ve just ‘made sense of ’. Let’s now return to thinking about foreground and background in more general terms. Look at Figure 14.2 and your eye is likely to be drawn to the foreground: one symbol ‘stands out’ from the rest – here because it is a different shape. I could also have printed the same shape in bold, or the same shape slightly larger than the others. At the same time, you see the formation of all the symbols as one group, and because of the way I have typed these in, you’ll see the lines as well as the columns.

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Figure 14.2 Foreground and background Let’s return to thinking about music.

14.3 Musical grammar (or, can you hum ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’) Musical grammar is generally understood as the musical rules or conventions of a particular musical culture. As Western persons, we are familiar with the musical systems of tonal diatonic or chromatic harmony. As young children, we do not ‘know’ that this is a diatonic or chromatic system, but know how (our culture’s) music sounds and how it ‘works’. So, while Western musical training teaches us the vocabulary to ‘make sense’ of these conventions through a specific coded system, we grow up with a social knowing of what music sounds ‘right’ and what does not. Let’s now think about what happens when you hum a ‘tune’. Let’s say that you’re driving on the motorway, you’re in a good mood and humming ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’ (perhaps you were at a party last night…). Even if you’re not a ‘trained’ musician, while humming the ‘tune’ you generate, and listen to, musical grammar. You might also ‘hear’ the tune’s harmonic colour in your mind; and remember and imagine a choral arrangement that you once heard, and also know its musical style or genre – it is a folk tune, modal, and upbeat. All of this is implicit knowledge – you may not know how to ‘describe’ any of these ‘bits’ of musical grammar, since you haven’t been trained in music theory. Nevertheless, a lot of mental activity goes on as you hum!

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As well as hearing the tune in your mind, you reproduce rhythmic and melodic patternings, sequencing, variations, developments of the ‘tune’. While humming (and driving!) you monitor the stability, variations and adaptation of the tune. You sing the first phrase, then the second, which is a sequential repetition of the first, beginning one tone lower; then the third phrase that begins on the original tone, but changes directions halfway through, and so on. You are constantly comparing and contrasting all of these ingredients of music – melody, rhythm, phrasing, harmonic colour – with your stored memory of musical style and idioms, absorbed and revised as you listen to different kinds of music (usually while driving your car). Let’s now return to an earlier music group scenario and apply some of what you’ve just read. Here I’ve adapted the scenario we looked at in Chapter 9.

14.4 Perceptual prominence Vignette 14a (adapted from Vignette 9e) This is a one-off improvisation group with a group of adults who are health-care professionals.They have come together as part of a public presentation on Music-as-Communication, and after the morning of theory and video presentations,we are doing an after-lunch experiential ‘workshop’ (a good antidote to the post-prandial somnolence that usually bedevils this time of the day). There are six of us: James has two tall congas, Hannah two large cymbals, S’bongile the bongos, Alfred has the temple blocks, Elena the chromatic vibraphone and I have the large bass drum. We stand in a circle, our instruments in the middle, and, at my suggestion, our eyes are closed. There is a long silence until James bursts into rapid beating on the congas,and instantly,the rest of the group (bar myself) ‘jump in’. The whole group continues playing in rapid, accentuated sforzando mode, whilst I give the occasional tap on the bass drum. Alfred and Elena stop playing. James continues, while Hannah’s cymbal crashes get louder and faster. S’bongile’s bongo playing now seems to have little connection to James or Hannah. Each of them seems to be ‘doing their own thing’. James’ loud beating continues to dominate the improvisation. Elena erupts on her vibraphone, with loud, fast and tight clusters of sounds. Suddenly James stops. Elena continues for a split-second after him and stops.

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Have you noticed the change in emphasis resulting in the way that I adapted the vignette? (You might want to re-read the original to refresh your memory.) Both vignettes describe the same event, but here I’ve excluded comments to do with personal nuances, because of the emphasis on the music being improvised. Perceptually, James’ playing is clearly differentiated from that of the group. First of all, he begins in the ‘silence’, and even when the rest join in, his playing is the loudest and clearest acoustically. The rest of the players are rather more difficult to hear, remaining in the background. Our perceptual grouping mechanisms enable us to hear James’ music as one continuous event rather than as a collection of beats. We generate the grammatical structure of his playing – the pulse, pitch, rhythm, tempo – as we listen, and ‘fit’ together the layers of musical information: metre, rhythmic patterns, phrasing, dynamic level. We also make use of cognitive (and musical) mechanisms of sequence, variation, adaptation, extensions, and so on. At the same time, each of the players ‘fits’ one another’s music together, using principles of similarity, continuity, proximity and closing. Also, the more ‘different’ James’ playing is from the rest of the group, the greater the perceptual ‘distance’ between him and the group’s playing. There is a moment in the vignette when everyone plays together. Perceptually we can describe this as a moment when all the players have ‘entrained’: in other words, their mental and neurological processes have adapted to one another – or rather, to James’ playing. However, we see that things begin to ‘fall apart’: soon, each of the three players seem to be ‘doing their own thing’. What we hear is something like ‘chaos’: the music (as a whole) does not quite ‘fit’ together, so we hear ‘bits’ of foreground, background rapidly shifting and interrupting one another. Even here, though, our musical training enables us to ‘compare’ these fragmented bits of sounds with – let’s say – music of contemporary composers. In fact, the improvisation reminds us of bits of George Crumb and Peter Maxwell-Davis – and we are able to ‘make sense’ of it, in a global grammatical sense. And so on… Let’s now imagine that this group eventually begins to ‘flow’ together musically. There are distinctive musical cues offered and taken up by others in the group, who reproduce and adapt and extend these musical offerings. Here we can imagine the players not just ‘entraining’ to one dominant pattern, or withdrawing from the music altogether, but rather, we imagine them taking turns at being in the ‘foreground’ of the group musical texture, and returning to the ‘background’.

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Here, we can imagine some grammatical flexibility and the fluid movement from one musical style to another. S’bongile might take a cue from Elena’s playing and ‘make sense’ of it for herself as reminding her of a ‘jig’. She’d reproduce this, it would be heard and ‘processed’ by others in the group, and all players might ‘click’ into a common musical style together. None of this happens, however. If we return to the group in this vignette and take a transverse view of the group event, we see that the perceptual gap between James and the group is substantial and remains so. Nobody else seems to ‘emerge’ into the foreground. However, if we imagine a more fluid ‘give and take’ between players, the distance between foreground and background might be much more flexible and shifting. Implied in all of this is that it is not necessarily the person in the foreground that makes a move to shift the distance between themselves and the group, but that others in the group might shift towards the foreground. In an optimal musically flowing group, all members move fluidly in and out of the foreground and nobody ‘hogs’ it, and neither do the rest remain hidden in the background, indistinguishable and out of focus, so to speak.

14.5 How are we talking? (And what are we talking about?) While not pretending to present more than a very brief introduction of perceptual psychology and music cognition, this chapter has discussed one group improvisation using a distinctive, music-based discourse. There are two important points here: one is that by taking on only one discourse (as I have done here), we risk limiting our reflections and our thinking about the group event. And in any case, bodies of knowledge date as the prevailing philosophical currents and discourses shift (which they inevitably do). The other point is that by shifting between discourses in an unconsidered manner, your thinking, reflecting and ‘talking about’ risks being careless. Neither is very helpful in terms of explaining what you do to others. By familiarizing yourself with various discourses (of which this book is a tiny tip of the proverbial iceberg), and by drawing from them in an informed way, you will be in a fluid, flexible position of deciding for yourself how best you want to reflect, and talk, about your work. Is this a lot of hot air? As musicians it is easy to think that since we work through music, we don’t need to bother too much about how we think about what we do. In my experience, we do need to think rather a lot about what we do, if our work is to be optimally satisfying, challenging and richly textured! And if we’re thinking in words, then we need to be clear about how best to find

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the words to fit what we’re doing. This is not a haphazard occupation of doodling with concepts and ideas. Rather, by thinking carefully (and, I hope, adventurously), you’ll find that your reflections are much more nuanced. This will impact on the quality of what you do in your group music sessions.

CHAPTER 15

Persons as Music (and Finding the Groove) There are various vignettes throughout the book, where group musicking does not ‘flow’. In some vignettes, this ‘non-flowing’ is overt, in the sense that you can hear it in the group improvisation, whilst in other vignettes, you don’t hear anything in the music, but there is a feeling inside of you that tells you that things are not quite right. Your orchestra rehearsal is not going too well, and you cannot figure out what’s going on, since everyone’s ‘playing the right notes’. In your music appreciation group there is a lot of eye contact going on, and other signals that confirm your hunch that the group’s not quite ‘present’. This chapter helps you to find the groove by drawing from psychological literature in communicative musicality and from music therapy literature to help you to ‘make sense’ of flowing and not flowing.

15.1 Negotiating the flow: Communicative musicality Consider the act of conversation between two six-year-olds. Vignette 15a Anna and Rosie sit on the pavement, chatting. ‘My mum’s got me a new puppy,’ says Anna. ‘What’s his name?’ asks Rosie. ‘Not he, silly, her name’s Nikita…’ ‘That’s a funny name! My dog’s called Sally…’ ‘Sally! That’s a girl’s name!…’ ‘My dog’s a girl! My dad says we can let her have puppies!…’ … And so on.

We can imagine Anna and Rosie organizing their sounds and silences in response to one another. They take turns to speak, which means that Anna will 183

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be silent while Rosie speaks (and vice versa). The switch-overs of speaking flow smoothly, with very subtle signals that include change in eye-gaze, head movements and facial expression, and shifts in posture. Anna and Rosie apparently possess an acute awareness of the timing and duration of their spoken utterances, and the timing of the switch-over when the other person begins to speak. At times they interrupt one another other, and there may also be moments of speaking simultaneously, of speaking out of turn, of pauses in between turns, of longer mutual silences and so on. What we see here is a huge and subtle variety of acts: a combination of verbal, physical, gestural acts, continuously being organized by the two friends. While remaining two separate persons, Anna and Rosie’s co-ordination both within themselves and towards one another creates a communicating dyad showing infinite flexibility of negotiated timing, intensity, duration and contour – in relation one with the other. However, there is much more than just ‘conversational turn-taking’ happening here: these two children together create an intimate knowing of one another and, critically, of themselves, in this inter-flow of ‘being’ – something that most of us take for granted in everyday living. Those of us not neurologically or physically or mentally impaired are able to constantly adapt the intensity, contours, duration, of our verbal and non-verbal acts, and to receive micro-cues from our communicating partners as to when to begin – and stop – speaking. All of these adaptations and variations take place along a continuum of mutually negotiated pulse: in other words, Anna and Rosie together set the tempo of their conversation. For example, most of us have had the experience of meeting someone who talks extremely slowly. Were we to continue with our usual up-beat speaking tempo we would both become uncomfortable. There would be an absence of ‘symmetry’ between us, with one remaining fast and the other slow. Generally, here, our own speaking and gestures slow down – and at the same time, theirs might speed up, until we find a ‘happy medium’ that suits us both. This ‘happy medium’ is the mutual negotiation of tempo: the pulse of the conversation as well as its dynamic level, phrasing, timbre, etc is mutually created by us both. Psychologist Colwyn Trevarthen talks of intrinsic musicality that is present from birth, that provides communicative and expressive power to our communicative acts. The Papouseks’ work on motherese shows that, from birth, babies (and, one hopes, their mothers too) adjust the micro-timing of their being, i.e. their eye-gaze, vocal sounds, body movements, smile, facial expressions, in response to those of their mothers. These micro-adjustments are embedded in innate neurological mechanisms of non-verbal communication. Thus, babies

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are highly receptive and sensitive to any shift in their mother’s moods and feelings, and are themselves able to initiate shifts in expressions and communication. They are able to ‘tune in’ to their mother (or primary carer), and together with her create, and enter a ‘flow’ of relating with one another. The basis of this flow is neurological, displayed through mental, physical and emotional ‘being with’ an ‘other’. Here is innate musicality: i.e. the capacity to be fluid, flexible in volume, tempo, rhythm, timbre, contour and intensity of facial expression, vocal sounds, acts and gestures, in order to reach optimal attunement between mother and baby. This intrinsic musicality underpins our acquired musical skills, which we develop from the social and musical culture in which we grow. Here, we need to rethink music (in the formal, cultural sense) not as something separate from our selves, or as ‘artform’ that we aspire to by practising until we become skilled musicians. Rather, this music may be reframed as a formalized, possibly stereotyped external sign of human communication. In our everyday communicating acts, we exercise and refine our communicative musicality. In making music, we use these mechanisms of human communication in order to lend creative and individual power to that ‘other’ music that we decide to play, with its particular grammar, idioms and styles. The term ‘interactional synchrony’ describes our astonishing capacities for micro-adjustments of gestures and acts (in all senses of the word) in order to engage with other human beings. This capacity for harmonious and congruent responsiveness, which is at the heart of human communication, makes us fluid and responsive human beings, able to know and to empathize with one another. Conversely, the absence, or incapacity for synchronous relating – which is often a feature of mental illness, of severe emotional trauma, severe depression or the result of neurological impairment or physical disability – interferes with our capacity to be in fluid, mutual communication with one another, resulting in stilted and limited communication. Unless, that is, the ‘other’ person is able to adapt to our collapsed or limited capacity! In group music, some of the vignettes we have described reveal interactional synchrony through music-making, which we might call inter-musical synchrony. Here we see players adapting their own way of playing in order to ‘fit’ with one another in the music. In other vignettes, we see asynchronous group experiences (or musical asynchrony): musical experiences in which the pulse cannot be negotiated between the players, and the music cannot flow.

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At the heart of this chapter, then, is the understanding that we can listen to 1 music not just as art-form, but also as human expression and communication. Community musicians, ensemble leaders and music teachers (who may or may not be working with disabled populations) do not necessarily possess the training or the skills to ‘repair’ the group’s communicative and expressive limitation – which is more the remit of music therapists – but this is no reason not to work in contexts where groups do not flow. (Just as, conversely, music therapists work with those who are high functioning and successful – and who may be seeking to explore and develop their creativity – both in the personal and in the artistic sense.) In any case, ‘not flowing’ happens in every group, no matter how neurologically intact, musically skilled, or well-intentioned! The point in this discussion is to clarify that any sensitive and reflective musician intuitively experiences music as having to do with being human, just as being human is about music-being. It is this personal-musical sensitivity and receptiveness that is clarified by this literature – hence the space accorded it here. Also, this understanding clarifies why and how music-making in groups elicits human and social sensitivity and bonding. When musicking with groups of people – whether high functioning or not – understanding the fundamental concept that music-making can be about innate communicative musicality will add richness and complexity to your act of making music, enabling the group to experience themselves as part of the human community. Let’s now look at group flow.

15.2 Spotting the flow, creating the groove We’ve seen that interactional synchrony or the jointly created flow of communication is a subtle event signalled through nuances of posture, verbal inflection, eye gaze, vocal intonation and facial expressions. Music therapists who practise improvisational music therapy are trained to ‘read’ and ‘recognize’ these mechanisms for interactional synchrony – to do with timing, intensity, contour, phrasing, duration – in spontaneous co-created clinical improvisation. In other words, the improvisation itself reveals the person’s capacity for relationship, which can be worked with and ‘grown’ in a joint musical journey that is profoundly intimate, and can invite the client towards previously uncharted personal experiences. Indeed, for some clients, 1

These ideas have been developed extensively in literature listed in the Recommended Reading section.

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music therapy improvisation may be their first explicit experience of their own innate and communicative musicality – through music. Even though group music may not have clinical improvisation as its basis, the players’ personal and interactive capacities can, at the very least, be invited by the group musician, through acute listening for, and eliciting, of the group groove. Anthropologists Charles Keil and Steven Feld speak of ‘the groove’ as a musical-social ‘space’ which has enough temporal ‘slack’ to accommodate the personal temporal ‘discrepancies’. The temporal groove invites participation from all, rather than being exclusive to only those players who ‘fit’ in a tightly defined beat. This notion of a group ‘groove’ is a way of thinking about a group’s common musical momentum and concurrence, which is flexible enough to accommodate all the players. Here, in a group improvisation, the flexibility and latitude of the groove invites participation from everyone – even those who may not have a very steady way of playing (for whatever reasons). As the group facilitator, you need to be certain that the groove remains inclusive: a tight neat groove (which is, in fact, not a groove at all) may alienate those whose innate musicality is collapsed or severely limited. James’ playing, in Vignette 9e, effectively excluded the rest of the group: they found themselves either ‘doing their own thing’, i.e. setting up their own ‘groove’ possibly in the hope of including others and creating a ‘sub-groove’, or else withdrawing from the music altogether. Let’s think now about folk who have a physical/neurological disability.

15.3 Physical disability: Is ‘grooving’ possible? In contrast to mental or emotional disabilities or disorders that may be invisible, 2 physical disability is overt. It presents the injury, disability and the incapacity to ‘flow’ in the world explicitly. We see the intra-personal asynchrony, the interruptions of flow in movements and utterances, the disruptions of gestures, the arrhythmic speech. When such a person makes music, we hear the asynchrony, or disrupted movements and gestures are reflected in their music. In other words, there is a congruence between what we, as group facilitators, see and what we hear in the person’s music. 2

Some of the ideas for this section came from discussions with Matthew Dixon, music therapist at Northwick Park, London.

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What do we do about this; how can music accommodate asynchrony and un-flowing-ness? Before reflecting on this, let’s look at another ‘non-musical’ vignette. This time I draw from Christopher Nolan’s book, Under the Eye of the Clock. It is Joseph’s first day at Mount Temple school, and his friends, Eddie and Peter, wheel him into his first class music lesson. Vignette 15b Joseph was schooling his body to stay calm,whilst the boys were negotiating how they’d manage to curtail his arms. ‘We are bringing you to the music room for singing,’ confided Peter and there at the end of a green corridor they came upon a group of pupils standing waiting for the teacher to unlock the door. He let the boys and girls pass inside and then, conscious of his new pupil, he came towards him and taking his hand he shook it warmly saying as he did so, ‘You’re very welcome to Mount Temple. I hope, Joseph, that you’ll be very happy here with us.’ Eddie then eased the wheelchair into the room and class began. Seeming curious, cheeky-faced Joseph moved his gaze from one student to the next whilst they, anxious not to seem afraid, quickly swerved away when his eye fell upon them.He smelt their utter fear of him but was anxious too not to add to their worry by getting tense and grimacing wildly as facial muscles twisted askew in spasm. (p.39)

The passage opens with two negotiations going on: Joseph negotiating with himself, ‘schooling’ his body to remain calm, while Eddie negotiates how to manage Joseph’s flailing arms – we see here a meeting of minds, with Eddie, Peter and Joseph thinking about the same thing at the same time, although we do not ‘see’ how this meeting of minds happens. We read that when Peter speaks to Joseph, the tone is confidential – in other words, it is unlikely to be loud or forceful, and we imagine his speaking to be quiet and sotto voce – something private that is for Joseph only. Apart from the social conventions of saying something ‘privately’ within a group context, we can imagine that Peter tunes in to the quality of Joseph’s curiosity, anxiety – which, after all, most of us might feel when confronted with a new situation. The teacher is ‘conscious of his new pupil’ – who happens to be in a wheelchair and not altogether a pretty sight. We imagine that he too feels somewhat anxious and uncertain (after all, Joseph is somewhat different to the children he usually teaches). His warm shaking of hands conveys a whole lot of messages. We can imagine this to convey something like, ‘I am not quite sure

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about you and your condition, and don’t quite know how I should deal with it, but I should like to let you know that I am unsure, and that perhaps we can together learn how to know one another.’ (How on earth do I think that this might be what the handshake conveys? And why should you, the reader, believe me? In writing this, I assume that we – you and I – are more or less adept at ‘reading’ social conventions of signalling within this specific social culture – i.e. that we share an understanding of certain relational signals. Thus, in reflecting on this text I draw from a collective emotional and relational vocabulary, hoping that together we ‘make sense’ of this situation. I cannot ‘see’ your response to this as you read – so I have to rely on my imagined ‘seeing’ of your reading of this text. Also, of course, as readers, we all ‘read into’ the descriptions in the text, drawing from our own experiences of ‘reading’ non-verbal signals.) Then there is the fascinating second half of the text, which we might name the ‘eye dance’: there are various quick movements of eye-gaze, hither and thither between Joseph and the other children. He ‘smells their fear’. How does he ‘smell’ it? How does he know that they are fearful? Why is the ‘gaze dance’ not one of complicity and mischief, with the teacher being at the butt of some (as yet undecided) school children’s prank? Joseph identifies something about ‘fear’, and knows that this has something to do with his body not quite portraying a flow, or expressing itself in a way that might put them at ease. He therefore has to make a decision – he cannot afford to get anxious because he knows that when he feels anxious, his body will go into spasms. You and I can be anxious and are (more or less) able not to portray this in our acts and gestures, if we do not want the ‘other’ to ‘read’ our anxiety. Joseph has no such control – his body will give his anxiety away. Critically for Joseph, he is able to ‘know’ how the children feel about him. He has an acute capacity to ‘smell’ their fear. This is interesting: he uses another sense – one that is unerringly accurate to describe what he knows. But at the same time he sees, he hears and he ‘reads’ the signals of the other children. We might say that until the children get to learn how to ‘decode’ his confusing and uncontrolled body signals, they will remain confused – and afraid of him. We know that physical disability – such as Joseph’s – usually results in an inaccuracy of conveying oneself (in the conventional sense) – whether through speech, facial expressions, gestures or music – and in being received by the communicating partner in an uncertain manner. In terms of interactional synchrony, there is a lack of symmetry between Joseph and the class, although his friends Eddie and Peter constantly attempt to adjust themselves to him – Peter speaks to him ‘confidentially’, possibly quite slowly as well as softly, because at this early stage Peter still needs to ‘get to know’ Joseph – how to read what Joseph thinks

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and feels through his body. We see also a ‘mis-fit’ in the flow between Joseph and the class, and the potential for distress for both. In the children’s minds, Joseph is ‘inaccurate’ in signalling what he means – in the social conventions of signalling in that particular school. The children’s inaccuracy in ‘reading’ him impacts their relationship at this early stage, and, undoubtedly, on Joseph’s sense of self, on his self-confidence, self-esteem and his sense of agency. There is something poignant in his having to assume responsibility for not making his classmates even more afraid of him: part of his social identity, we can imagine, is being the one who causes fear and embarrassment to others, and of having to ‘do’ something about it. And this is just what Joseph is so unsuccessful at – in the collective social sense. Gradually, Joseph, Peter, Eddie and the other children will negotiate a way of getting to know one another, by learning to ‘read’ one another’s non-verbal signals. Joseph, of course, does this already – but he cannot let others know that he knows. His body does not ‘flow’ in a way that enables others to ‘flow’ with him and create a shared meaning, in these early group moments. The point about this vignette, as well as that showing Anna and Rosie chatting on the pavement, is that ‘grooving’ is about ‘being synchronized’ with one another. Grooving doesn’t only happen in music. When your rehearsals or listening groups or music-making groups don’t ‘flow’, you need to think about interactional synchrony, and think about the group groove. Who’s ‘setting’ the ‘tone’ for the group? Who’s ‘hogging the groove’ (a contradiction in terms)? In the group improvisation scenario in Vignette 9e, it is easy to hear James’ dominance. But long before your group starts musicking, you need to transfer this listening acuity in music to the non-verbal signals in the group. After all, music is about non-verbal communication, and non-verbal communication is about music! Let’s move to music and see what a group improvisation sounds like.

15.4 Persons as music: Flowing and grooving If we accept the premise that in making music we present ourselves and our capacity for human relationships (rather than only our musical skills), then group music-making – in whatever setting – can be informed by the understanding that making music together is about much more than making music. Group musicking can be seen and experienced as being about creating and sustaining human relationships, with all their complications and potentials and frustrations – through the musical event. In group musicking of whatever kind – whether in music education, choral training, orchestral rehearsals or community

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productions – this fundamental principle gives emotional, relational social meaning to the immensely powerful act of being in music together. At the same time, though, understanding alone does not give the non-music therapist group musician the skill to ‘hear’, address or repair lack of cohesion, rigidity or fragmentation that may be the result of neurological, psychological, emotional or social dysfunction, disability or disorder. It may, however, offer non-music therapists clarity as to the distinctions between making music in order to make good music, to create community and enhance social experience on one hand, and making music as an act of psychological and emotional growth (or as an act of repairing dysfunction/disability or disorder). Incidentally, I do not see the two as mutually exclusive, but rather as overlapping. Having absorbed aspects of communicative musicality, let’s look at the group improvisation scenario below. Vignette 15c We’re back in our one-off improvisation group with a different group of adults who have come together as part of a public presentation on Music-as-Communication.Jeremy has two tall congas,Helen two large cymbals, Suzie the bongos, Adam has the temple blocks, Ella the chromatic vibraphone and I have the large bass drum.We are standing in a circle, our instruments in the middle, and, at my instructions, our eyes are closed.We are ‘waiting’ for sounds to emerge from us.There is a strong silence, which increases in intensity and has a slightly hard, pregnant quality. Jeremy bursts into rapid beating on the congas, and instantly, the rest of the group (bar myself) ‘jump in’. Jeremy’s playing has the same intensity and slight hardness as the silence before the music. The group continues playing in rapid, accentuated sforzando mode, whilst I give the occasional tap on the bass drum. I begin to feel slightly uncomfortable with the intensity of the sound texture. I become aware of no ‘space’ or ‘breathing’ in the music. Adam and Ella stop playing. Jeremy continues, while Helen’s cymbal crashes get louder and faster. Jeremy falters and begins to play more slowly, less tightly. Ella then plays a simple melodic rhythm which Jeremy imitates on the congas. She repeats her melodic rhythm while Jeremy begins playing regular, quiet taps on the conga, which support her playing. Adam then plays a rhythmic pattern on the temple blocks,which relate to Ella’s melody. Jeremy stops playing. Ella’s melody trails off into silence, while Adam’s rhythmic pattern is taken up by Helen on the

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cymbals, soon joined by Suzie on the bongos. The three of them develop bouncy, jig-like music that seems to draw the rest of us. We all join in, accenting the second beat of their playing – rather like a reggae beat – and, as if by magic, we all end at the same instant and burst into excited laughter. Here, there is musical–personal flexibility and reciprocity between the players, and a jointly negotiated group groove. When Helen begins to play loud and fast on the cymbals, Jeremy does not shut her out: he hears her playing emerging into the musical foreground, and his response it to falter and play more slowly and quietly. He responds to her in a way that acknowledges what she plays, adapting his playing to what she does, which ensures a jointly negotiated shift in musical relationships and roles. We see these jointly negotiated ‘grooves’ throughout the excerpt: Adam introduces a rhythmic pattern on the temple blocks, which ‘relate to’ Ella’s melody. In other words, Adam enters into the common flow – and by doing so, also contributes to it. He doesn’t just ‘entrain’ – in the sense of adapting himself to Ella’s melody – but also offers something of his own tempo and rhythm, contributing to the ‘group music’ as a whole. Critically, though, the ‘group music’ is negotiated by all. Jeremy possibly recognizes that his playing does not quite fit. He stops playing (rather than insisting on ‘his’ version of the group music). His stopping, incidentally, is also a contribution to the groove: by continuing, he might prevent it from happening.

15.5 Concluding notes This chapter has used two vignettes that are ‘non-musical’ to make a fundamental point: that as human beings, our acts are musical in character. How we ‘are’ in our daily life includes flowing, grooving – assuming we have the neurological flexibility to ‘flow’ with others, and assuming that others have the neurological flexibility to ‘flow’ with us. As musicians involved in group work, you need to ‘spot the flow’ long before you begin making music with the group: listen to the quality of buzzing – or of quietness – in the room: it speaks volumes, and you need to know how to listen and make sense of it. The next chapter takes a broader look at persons and music from the perspective of our personal and social identity.

CHAPTER 16

Group Music, Identity and Society This chapter reflects on a self-evident issue: that any group is made up of individual persons each with a unique experience of themselves that combines their individual and social identities. These layers of identity are created by our socio-economic, regional and cultural life contexts, as well as our uniqueness as persons. As individual persons, our socially determined roles combust on one another in sessions and, just to complicate matters, there is also the group context that generates particular roles, and creates a group identity for each of us as group members – including you as group leader. The issue of identity is complex and has a vast literature in the fields of sociology and social psychology. I do not pretend to cover all aspects of ‘identity’ here, but present various aspects in order to alert you to issues to do with identity in music groups. Once again, this chapter is for everyone; providing concepts that underpin both your thinking and your actions, whatever your working context. Let’s have a look.

16.1 Identities and roles: Shifts and stabilities Identity is a complicated notion. It has to do with our sense of belonging to various groups – ranging from family, friends, regions, professions to broader groups such as gender or race. Identity also has to do with how we see ourselves within our various social groups, how we are seen by them, and what groups we are identified with in the public mind. The term ‘identity’ means different things in different places and at different times and, moreover, means more than one thing at a time: for instance, we think of our private and public identity and of our personal and collective identity. Most of us belong to groups that have to do with fixed, inherited identities (such as ethnicity, ancestry, gender, race and – in some cases – our geographical, historical and social milieu). These can be seen as underpinning our belief systems, language, and our culture (whatever that means). Combinations of these collective, inherited (and usually stable) aspects give us a sense of who we are, and how we are experienced by our various social groups. 193

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What we have so far is layers of collective identity, with different aspects of ourselves more or less prominent at any given time, place or social context. At the same time as having multi-collective identities, we have our individuality and uniqueness: that je ne sais quoi that makes me who I am, which is different from you; and that makes each one of us unique in our daily engagements with life. Closely aligned with our various identities are the roles we play as members of social groups. Most of us have distinctive and multiple social roles: in my family life alone I am an aunt, confidante, daughter, sister, partner, parental figure, sister-in-law, niece and friend, and apparently able to move with ease from one role to another. Each of these roles, however, is adjacent to one another, and they have in common something essential about me. My personal and highly idiosyncratic ‘colours’ and ‘textures’ have to do with the convergence of my various roles and identities. As well as all of this, there is for each of us our individual and collective continuity of ourselves in the past, present and future. Here, our memory colours our personal history, and our awareness of continuity as we continue to live in our social and geographical milieu continuously shapes our sense of the essential ‘I’. Thus, identity resonates with, and is shaped by, our sense of being a ‘part of ’ (or apart from) the milieu in which we are born, raised, taught, play, pray, work and eventually die; as well as our collective and individual past and present. Another complexity is that some aspects of our individual identity are more shifting than others. For example, my gender identity, as well as my ethnicity and religious culture, are constants in my life. My physical identity remains the same, whilst also changing as I age and change body shape, hair colour, etc. However, even with these apparently stable identities, my different ethnic and gender nuances emerge depending on where I am in the world, with which part of my family I engage, and what language I speak. Similarly, my professional identity shifts, depending on whether I am in my academic environment, giving a talk to the Parkinson’s Association, delivering a keynote address at an international conference or running an experiential workshop as a community musician. Here we’re approaching the notion that identity is also a public phenomenon: to do with our role in different contexts, and how we are ‘seen’. Thus, by the university I am seen as an academic, by the conference as a writer, by the Parkinson’s Association as a music therapist and by the workshop participants as a community musician – and these roles are different parts of only my professional identity!

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Personal identity can also be seen as a process, constructed through our relationships with one another, rather than only being something fixed, or something that is ‘given’ to us by our environment (in a rather stereotypical way). Here, identity has to do with our sense of agency – in other words, how 1 we impact on the world, how we receive the world and make sense of it, and how the world makes sense of us.

16.2 Public and collective stereotypes The public aspect of identity leads us to think of stereotypes. Here are collectively assigned labels that have fixed characteristics that can apparently be easily transplanted, across vastly different contexts, from one person or group to another. Thus, for example, ‘Zulu children are noisy in class,’ and ‘old people are selfish’. Even where the Zulu children are being raised in Finland, or the old person is part of a religious order that believes in a life of charity. Stereotyping, such as in these two examples, is a whisker away from personal and collective prejudice and the marginalization of groups (such as Romanies, AIDS sufferers or murderers). Any of these ‘social exclusions’ from so-called mainstream life is based on fixed, largely unexplored, publicly assigned labels and caricatures that are apparently acceptable to society at large. Also, with the stereotyping of social groups, individuals cannot be distinguished from the supposed collective characteristics of their group: thus, all Zulu children are noisy no matter where or how they are being raised, and old people everywhere and always are selfish. These socially sanctioned stereotyped views can result in our assigning or anticipating personal characteristics or musical/group roles to folk in our groups, as a consequence of how we stereotype them. The resulting role prescriptions can hinder the possibilities for a person experiencing themselves – and being experienced by the group – in another way, which might be critical in terms of growing a different identity. As group workers we need to remain receptive to the personal, dynamic and mutual creating of one another’s identities as we engage with one another.

1

By the world I don’t mean the planet earth or political globe, but rather, the reality of daily life. This is the ‘world’ in which each of us lives, and which is distinct for each one of us.

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Vignette 16a A young offender is referred to your music group at the local community centre.In fact,this is how he’s referred,and it takes a while to find out his name. You know that, being a young offender, with a criminal record, Ben is possibly dishonest and anti-social. In spite of your training (and yourself!),you find yourself watching Ben out of the corner of your eye during the first few sessions. Embarrassingly, he sees you watching him.

If you’re able to ‘relax’ about what Ben might have done, and engage with him in a way that is uncluttered by the stereotypes accompanying the label of ‘young offender’, there is a chance that your attitude towards him in the music group will enable Ben to ‘grow’ another identity. He might experience himself as a musician, as the one who’s quite good on the drums, who likes Eminem, and who’s always on time for the sessions. If, on the other hand, you cannot get away from stereotyping him, you risk confining your attitude and thoughts about him. You’ll see him as someone who likes the drums and you’d better keep an eye on them because he might go off with them; and he likes this pop stuff that has rather bad swearwords; and he’s always slightly early, and is he having a good look around at what else might be of interest in the room. These distinctive attitudes towards Ben, as a young person and as a young offender, will elicit rather different relationships between the two of you, and between Ben and the rest of the group. Also, each of these will generate a rather different sense of ‘self ’ for Ben. At the same time, though, you know that he is ‘ a young offender’ – with all that this implies. You’re not pretending that those aspects of him do not exist, but perhaps you’re willing to put these at the back of your mind (although perhaps not totally out of your mind), and meet him in a ‘fresh’ way as a human being. You might manage to be receptive to Ben without acting towards him as though you expect him to treat you as a disciplinarian person-in-charge. The implications, here, are that each of you risks becoming entrenched in stereotyping the other, rather than relating to one another as two persons with multiple identities, some more socially desirable than others, perhaps, but each with an equal chance to ‘grow’. Before thinking about identity and music, I want to dip into the context of working in health-related fields, and the impact of these contexts on our identity.

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16.3 Identity and health ‘Health’ is everywhere. There is emphasis on healthy eating, exercising, healthy living – and a not-so-hidden message that if you are not ‘health’ conscious, then you’re not pulling your weight as a member of society. In modern urban 2 cultures, there is social pressure to sustain a healthy lifestyle, that includes gym, vitamins and other social responsibilities to do with leisure and playing one’s part in contributing towards a health-conscious society. The culture that grows us generally defines health and illness on our behalf, and what is considered ‘ill’ in one culture, may be perfectly ‘healthy’ in another. Like other societies, Western societies shape illness, disability, disorder and health in a particular way, and expect ill people to fulfil socially sanctioned tasks that include seeking treatment, preferably from a ‘registered’ practitioner. Western-trained medical doctors also have their roles clearly defined, and are expected by society to alleviate symptoms, even if they cannot ‘cure’ the illness. Similarly, social belief systems shape our understandings and engagements with education, music, religion or therapy. Western psychology and psychoanalysis inform us that health in the mental sphere has to do with creativity, self-expression and self-development, and education certainly has to do with extending oneself, developing skills and knowledge – in order to become a useful and responsible member of society. Thus, folk might decide to join a choir in order to ‘de-stress’ (and stress is not a healthy thing); and joining your improvisation workshop might be part of someone ’s journey of self-development. Special education or remedial teaching are more explicitly health related, and generally have to do with addressing needs or remedying problems. However, the sub-text of activities that have to do with personal growth might be that if we are not committed to our personal growth, we’re not serious about our lives, nor are we serious about being part of a society with a healthy collective identity. All of this, of course, is a stereotyping of a certain lifestyle, but serves to make a point about identity and health. Thus, health, illness or disability (and I use these terms broadly) are not just to do with our individual state, but are part of our collective and public health identity. (Music therapist Wendy Magee has written about the ‘disabled’ or ‘spoiled’ identity in papers on her work with persons who suffer from neurological injuries (Magee and Davidson 2000).) A severe injury or illness (e.g. a stroke, terminal illness or brain injury) results in changed social roles, and our 2

I use the term ‘modern’ here, with a resonance from anthropology and sociology, to contrast with ‘traditional’ societies.

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changed social and personal identity. Thus, folk staring at our facial disfigurement after severe burns, make us feel a certain way – which impacts on how we experience ourselves as a member of society. After an accident that confines us to a wheelchair, we are seen as slower, less ‘able’ and rather ‘slow’ in terms of locomotion. After a stroke our speech is laboured and we experience other people being too fast, we see them trying to slow down (and possibly not succeeding), or generally being uncomfortable in our presence. Any of these experiences impacts on how we experience ourselves, and on how we think about ourselves. And these shifting roles and social identity will impact on group musicking. As we can see from this brief discussion, many of us – community musicians, music therapists, special education teachers, music teachers, and even church musicians and ensemble leaders – work in contexts closely associated with ‘health’ in this broadest sense. Let’s now consider identity and music.

16.4 Identity and music In Chapter 5 we touched on music as intimately connected with our sense of social self, while Chapter 12 explored how pieces of music become deeply significant in contributing to meaning in our lives. What we see in each of these chapters – and in much of this book – is that music is pivotal in generating our social identity, and in creating a sense of ‘belonging’ to a social group. Even Ruud (1998) reminds us of the various musics at different times of our life. There are the songs sung to us as very young children, possibly by parents or grandparents, and the songs we learnt at nursery school, possibly our first wider experience of our social culture. As adolescents, many of us experienced a sense of ‘being a part of ’ a peer group defined by music, and that defined our dress, manners of speaking, behaving and socializing. Social psychologists inform us that music contributes to our sense of ‘being a part of ’ a social group, as witnessed not only by the music, but also the dress code and behaviours – not only for adolescents, but also for specific regional groups and sub-groups (such as, for example, the Sunday morning congregation at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan). Also, we know that music is pivotal to public events such as weddings, May Day parades or the inauguration of a new head of state. The music becomes associated with such events, creating powerful collective associations and memories, which contribute to our sense of belonging to a certain place and time – and to a certain music.

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The rest of this chapter is based on a vignette used to focus on this business of roles and identities in music group work.

16.5 Who’s who Vignette 16b You’re with a group of old folk in a residential nursing home. Your group is of recently arrived residents who are relatively high functioning: able to care for themselves and engage socially. You suspect that some are rather distressed at being in a ‘home’,and faced with the longer-term residents, some of whom are in various stages of senile dementia. Although the latter live in ‘Frail Care’, which is a separate part of the home,there is mingling between various parts of the home. This is part of the holistic and integrated ethos of the nursing home. You work here one afternoon a week, throughout the year, and most group members are ‘regular’. Part of your brief is to run semi-closed groups, to plan and organize various concerts during the year, run the choir (for staff and residents), and have weekly small ‘closed’ music group sessions. Group members are recommended by the highly sympatique staff and, in keeping with the home’s ethos of inclusivity and holistic care, everyone is invited to take part. You love working here – and have a sense of being acknowledged and appreciated by staff and residents alike. It is your weekly session with five elderly folk: Helen (who is in a wheelchair due to her diabetes and leg-amputation); Iris (who originates from the Caribbean); John (who is rather boisterous and can annoy the other group members);Leslie (an ex-pastor,tends to pontificate and annoy the women especially); and Mary (your favourite member – an ex-school music mistress, prim and proper with a wicked twinkle). This group keeps you on your toes. You’re doing ‘Kumbayah Ma’ Lord’ and each person has an instrument. Your guitar playing and singing is upbeat, you’re all engaged and enjoying yourselves.During the chorus of the song,everyone plays and sings with gusto.You’ve changed the wording of each refrain to ‘Iris (or John, Leslie, etc)‘s playing, Lord, Kumbayah’. During the verses, all stop playing apart from the person whose name is being sung.Here it gets a little chaotic, since Leslie constantly encourages and praises the

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soloist; John exclaims loudly at the end of each verse, and then conducts everyone ostentatiously for the chorus; Mary giggles, and at times thanks the gentlemen in a teasing – or deprecating – manner, winking at you as though she knows that you and she think the men are ‘a nuisance’ (she’d never say ‘a pain in the butt’ or ‘show-offs’, which is your generation’s expression); Helen half-dozes when she’s not playing and is generally nudged awake by an attentive neighbour; and Iris flirts with the men, and is maternal and matronizing towards you. During some of the verses you do a bit of spontaneous vocal extemporizing, depending on how the soloist plays. This inevitably raises Mary’s eyebrows even higher, spurs John to greater praises with the occasional ‘Amen’,and provokes Iris to some loud spontaneous vocalizing of her own – not always quite harmonious with yours. The session is in the dining room – and since this has no door,some of the other residents wander in at times, often drawing voluble greetings from the gentlemen and Iris. Let’s unpack this a bit.

16.6 Sounding ourselves (i) As the group ‘leader’ you are assigned a leadership role that you need to own. You are also probably identified as ‘young’, ‘musical’, as a ‘professional’, possibly as a ‘do-gooder community worker’. While this may not be how you experience yourself in your everyday life, you may need to wear this prescribed identity with its accompanying roles (and possible stereotyping). As we’ll soon see, the group consists of individuals whose various identities – past and present – emerge in this brief peep into the weekly session. Part of your role as leader is to facilitate the emergence of fluid roles for each person in your group in sessions. Without your vigilance, John and Leslie might well dominate the event, stamping their (professional/past) identities firmly on the group, preventing more fluid roles for themselves or for others. How, then, to balance individuals and the group? How do we co-create a group identity in music, that also means something to each individual in the moment? Let’s begin by looking at each person. John shows off: he loves the spotlight, tends to sing loudly when it is his solo bit and constantly chivvies the group to sing louder and a bit faster. His acts have a hint of his social identity being strongly embedded in being a ‘ladies’

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man’, with all the accompanying roles and expectations that belong to his gender, social background, age, professional and cultural norms (and here, of course, I am aware that I risk stereotyping him). In terms of co-creating the group identity by all the members, his lively energy could get out of hand in the sense that he might end up in the role of insisting on (prescribing, in a sense) the group’s identity. Your role is to acknowledge his energy, possibly rein in his boisterousness, reassure and acknowledge him, invite him to channel his energy into the music, and ensure that there is enough musical ‘space’ to allow for other identities to be sounded. Mary’s winking and slight impatience are probably a combination of her past professional life, her social standing – and also, possibly, to do with her family culture. She has a way of being conspiratorial, humorous, and slightly wicked. You can imagine her in her role as a teacher, probably frightening and severe to most of her school charges – except those who had the imagination and intelligence to sense, and respond to, the twinkle in her eye. Here, part of your own social identity, as an ex-boarding school pupil, engages with Mary, so that in your imagination you speculate that she probably enjoyed her ‘prim and proper’ exterior.

16.7 A little divertimento I want to divert from talking about identity for a moment, to reflect a little about your own enjoyment of Mary. Although, privately, she is your favourite group member, in your role as group leader you need to be careful: professionally your role is to engage with all group members. At the same time, though, Mary makes the session more colourful, and there is an emotional acuity about her timing and subterfuge that helps you(!) by confirming your own hunches about what goes on between group members at any moment. Let’s reflect further: what do you make of Mary’s conspiratorial winks? Is this her attempt at creating a ‘sub-group’ – or to curry favour with you? Mary ‘reads’ very well what’s going on – the nuances underneath the acts – and this is helpful in confirming your own hunches at times. Her need, possibly, is to create an ‘exclusive’ alliance with you. After all, winking implies that there is a conspiratorial, exclusive contact between the two of you (whether or not others in the group notice this). Could it be that she needs your acknowledgement of her winks (even by your seeing them) that confirms what she ‘sees’? Or by acknowledging her winks, are you entering into ‘exclusive’ engagement with one member of the group at the expense of others? If you decide to ignore her winks, what might this convey to her – and to the rest of the group?

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I am not answering these questions – but present them here as part of the process of ‘reflecting on’ what happens during sessions! There is no single answer, but it’s more likely that by thinking about various possibilities, you’ll be alert to other interpersonal nuances in your sessions. In other words, the point here is to be reflecting in an inquiring and ‘uncertain’ way, leaving open various possibilities of meaning at once. Let’s return to our group.

16.8 Sounding ourselves (ii) Leslie is vociferous in his support – even if this support feels rather stuck and repetitive (i.e. always praising and supporting what others do). It seems that his professional identity predominates: with associated pastoral roles of being supportive, leading the congregational hymns, encouraging and generous with praise. His past identity as well as his slightly inappropriate current role in the group need to be acknowledged and managed, since there is in this an undercurrent of his challenging your role as leader, by co-directing the group. He may be giving you a message that in your role as group leader (as seen through his ‘lens’ of what your role ‘ought’ to be) you are not doing enough ‘leading’, so that he needs to ‘compensate’ by doing it ‘on your behalf ’. Helen’s nodding off is interesting. She possibly sleeps poorly at night, and perhaps part of her identity is invested in disability, or possibly her family was historically invested in keeping her in the role of ‘invalid’, which has become entrenched in her sense of self. She contributes a calming and stabilizing presence in the sessions. Her dozing off suggests something about finding the group comfortable (after all we do not doze off when things feel alarming); while her needs are – possibly – to not be noticed, and to be left ‘in peace’. This is an interesting one: is thinking about her in this way a ‘cop out’? Think about it: you’re hardly going to change her lifelong habits (and why should you?). She keeps on coming to the sessions (remember that folk come by invitation each week), and if she were not interested in the group, she would remain in her wheelchair, in her corner of the communal living room. Clearly music ‘gives’ her something – although you’re unsure as to what this is. We might speculate that the group gives her a sense of belonging – and it may be part of her social identity in the nursing home. Also, the group without her would be different in texture and quality of energy. We know little about her past, and her extreme passivity and lack of energy makes it difficult to ‘read’ her socially, culturally, professionally – we can situate her historically, ethnically and more or less geographically. That is about all.

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Iris is playful, youthful and socially elegant. Her flirting is not embarrassing or jarring with who she is – or the fact that she is elderly. Like John, her gender identity (being a woman – and an attractive one at that), as well as possibly her socio-cultural and regional origins, result in her enjoying music in a playful, flirtatious, overt way: you imagine her (out of your own social identity) as ‘the life and soul of a party’. She brings dynamism to the group. One of her social roles might have been to be ‘seen’, to be fun and lively and to be admired. And why not acknowledge and affirm this? Even if your (retro-feminist) principles mean that you ‘disapprove’ of women enjoying their attractiveness to the opposite sex, this is not the place to foist your ideologies onto others. Your role as group leader is to enable each group member to have a meaningful experience of themselves and of one another in your weekly sessions. Somehow, this collection of highly individualistic people manage to present their individual identities of age, gender, personal history, professional background and personal past, and be a group at the same time.

The inner track What’s been tricky in writing the above commentary is the risk of stereotyping each of the group members. Inevitably, each group member’s past histories and present circumstances, their memories and musical tastes impact on one another – and with you as group leader. Here, your own life experience and social identity nuances how you see and experience each group member! You can, I hope, manage to set aside your own social biases and preferences and receive each person as they are right here, right now, in the moment. At the same time, there is something about social stereotyping that is useful: something about ‘Miss Jean Brodie’ can be a point of reference in relation to Mary – so long as it is not the only point of reference you have.

It seems that even in thinking about this brief extract, we see the ongoing co-creating of individual and group identities. There are constant revisitings of past identities – whether gender, ethnic, geographical, religious or linguistic – through musical material, roles in group sessions, and through the coincidence of each person’s past on the present, and of each person on one another. Each of these contribute to the group identity – which is, itself, transient.

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16.9 What shall we sing-a-long? I’m aware of not having discussed the use of pre-composed songs in this chapter. This might seem remiss – especially in a session such as this one in the nursing home. However, we saw in Chapter 12 that songs have powerful associations with various aspects of our lives, and are part of our collective sense of belonging to a culture and social group. In a group such as the one we’ve peeped into, there is a historical overlap (let’s say that the group age range is between 65 and 80), which might give you ideas about musical material from various periods, which might have historical associations with past events. Be careful! Don’t assume that all know the same songs! For a start, Iris comes from another country, and her lack of familiarity with well-known tunes might make her feel excluded from the rest of the group. Leslie is ultra-religious and might find some songs offensive, and it turns out that Helen spent most of her life in India. It may be more useful to ask each person to offer a song that is meaningful to them – and draw them out about why it is meaningful, so that each person can learn about one another through the music/songs that individuals choose.

16.10 In conclusion This brief excursion into thinking about identity as personal, collective, private and public, and as both stable and shifting, has, I hope, alerted you to the complexities of group roles, attitudes and expectations. By being members of any social group, we are ourselves ‘changed’ and take different roles, experiencing ourselves in other ways. Music groups are social groups: whether an orchestra, choir, class-music or improvisation group; whether a one-off group, a short-term or a long-term group; whether made up of strangers or of folk who live together, each of your music groups will develop a distinctive musical as well as social identity! Each of these enables all the persons in the group – and that includes you – to experience themselves in a way that is distinctive to that group. Your joint musicking contributes to this sense of group identity, and is at the same time shaped by it. Here is a marvellous possibility for music and the group to be created, improvised and composed by one another.

CHAPTER 17

Absence, Presence and Climate Control In Chapters 6 and 8 we saw a group on a paediatric ward ‘coming together’ albeit in a rather haphazard way: some were a part of the group by being physically in the group circle, others remained in bed but were mentally engaged in the music, whilst others still remained outside the group event, apparently outside the social presence of others. That session was a permeable, public event and the children could come and go (physically or mentally) as they wished. We also spoke about creating a physical, musical and a temporal space for the session. Here I consider the nature of ‘absence’ and ‘presence’ in group music: how each is valuable in signalling the ‘climate’ of commitment, capacity for engagement, appropriateness of and responsiveness to your group leadership or facilitation skills, and so on. In other words, ‘absence’ by any group member or sub-group, may mean that you are not ‘in tune’. I also insist that neither ‘absence’ nor ‘presence’ is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the other, but rather that each of these acts (or non-acts) has value, and needs to be decoded by you. This chapter is useful for anyone and everyone who does any kind of group music work: whether highly structured or not, and whatever your work context. All of you will recognize the kinds of events described in the vignettes, as well as the reflections and discussions.

17.1 Absence and presence Presence and absence have rather nuanced meanings in this ongoing and dynamic group context, not quite as simple as being physically in or out of the music space, or absent from rehearsals or sessions. First, there are various ways of being absent and present: physically, mentally, emotionally – in various combinations. By mental I mean the perceptual, cognitive and other processes that enable us to be alert to, make sense of and process our environment. By emotional I mean the affective quality (both internal and overt) of our presence – which does not always coincide with our mental state, and which is not always 205

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apparent. By physical I mean our postures, gestures, acts – visible to others and received by them as signalling something about the ‘whole’ of us, and the quality of our presence or absence in the group. There is also our social presence: an awareness of ‘belonging’ to the group as a social entity, and awareness of others as social beings, and with distinctive as well as collective social identities. Finally, I’d like to think of presence of soul – akin to what the Buddhists call mindfulness – which I understand as a qualitative presence, denoting our whole being involved in group music-making. Presence, then, implies awareness of the group environment and being responsive and engaged in the moment, while absence implies a removal of oneself from the group event, unwillingness or incapacity, a resistance to being part of the ‘group’. At the same time, we need to be careful not to polarize the two: one can be absent from the group and be present internally to oneself. Also, one’s absence can be a powerful signal to the group – and to you – that something is not quite as it should be. In other words, be careful not to value presence more than absence, but rather think of each as being valuable and meaningful. Although it is rather artificial to separate physical, mental and emotional modalities from one another, I do this to help us consider the finer nuances of group engagements. Table 17.1 presents a few combinations of ‘absence’ and ‘presence’. Table 17.1 How present is your absence? Physically

Mentally

Emotionally

Person 1

Present

Present

Present

Person 2

Present

Absent

Present

Person 3

Present

Present

Absent

Person 4

Present

Absent

Absent

Also, anyone in the group (including you) can shift between presence and absence (in any modality ) very swiftly – so don’t think that you can ‘fix’ the group with one ‘formula’ for the entire session. More complex still, each member in the group may be in a different mode at any given time. You need your wits about you to ‘read’, acknowledge and respond to the quality of each person’s absence and presence. This will give group members a sense of being

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known by you and accepted, rather than judged for being ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the group work at that moment. This experience of being known is enormously valuable for most folk of all ages in daily life, but more so for those who are marginalized by society because of disabilities, illness, difficult behaviour, immigrant/refugee status or whatever. After all, we’re hoping that the music group leaves everyone feeling enriched by the experience of group intimacy. The point of reflecting on any of the possible combinations is to inform your responses – rather than have you ‘reacting’ to situations and to the various alliances, and potentially escalating the climate of tension in the group. The vignette below illustrates some fleeting shifts of presence and absence, as set out in Table 17.1. Vignette 17a: Four teenagers: Andrew, Benet, Chris and David. You’ve been working with four teenage boys in a residential home for young offenders for the past three months. Your brief is that this is a weekly space for the young lads to express themselves through musical activities. This is your tenth weekly session, and you’re struggling to engage them musically. You’re in a circle, and each of you has a Djembe drum. You’ve begun a semi-structured improvisation, with Benet providing a simple, repeated rhythmic pattern over which the rest of you layer your own rhythmic phrasings in an improvised way. Andrew and Chris have been staring out of the window, apparently oblivious to the fact that they’re playing their Djembes. The group energy is flat,and this flatness is portrayed in the collective drumming. You’re feeling irritated with Andrew and Chris, but refrain from saying something, because every now and then the flat drumming almost ignites. You’re willing to let the music carry the group energy for the moment,while monitoring its development.Like you and Benet, David is engrossed in the activity. You notice that Andrew is drifting off into his own world: he’s still playing but there is a numbed, glazed quality about his presence – a subtle shift from earlier. Your level of alarm rises a bit, but again you refrain from saying anything. Instead, in your drumming you slightly tighten the rhythmic pattern and Benet immediately picks up the shift in musical gear.The drumming (you,Benet and David) begins to gather energy,and you see that Chris,who together with Andrew was playing in a semi vacant way, has now stopped playing but seems alert to the change in the quality of the drumming. He shifts in his chair, looks

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towards the group (he was previously staring out of the window) but you’re not yet sure whether he is mentally ‘with it’ or not. Meantime, Andrew’s drumming unexpectedly becomes more urgent, although he appears unaware of what he is doing. Within a split-second Chris starts to play again in a more focused and attentive way. Both Chris and Andrew become flushed, their posture is more intent and they slightly lean forward in their chairs. For some moments the five of you are drumming intently together. Soon after this, Benet (who was the musical ‘leader’) stops playing and says that he doesn’t feel very well. Everyone stops playing. Some of you may resonate instantly with this kind of scenario, which is common across ages, work contexts and clinical conditions! I could have substituted old people, toddlers, autistic youngsters or a group of business-women who have come together to ‘play’. The ‘dynamic’ would be similar. (If you re-read the orthopaedic ward group work in Chapters 6 and 8, you’ll spot similarities.)

17.2 Shifting alliances: Musical and mental The absence and presence of each person shifts rapidly and defines the alliances during the music-making. One alliance is between you, Benet and David: the three of you are mentally, physically and emotionally engaged. Your drumming is not just a physical motor exercise, or a ‘musical’ one – in the cognitive, mental sense. There is a personal investment in what each of you does. At the same time, though, as the group facilitator, you are distinct from Benet and David. You have another kind of engagement in, and attention to, what goes on at each moment of the session, something that Benet and David are unlikely to have, although they are probably peripherally aware of Andrew and Chris’ semi-engagement. Thus, as well as the three of you (Benet, David and you) being one alliance, Chris and Andrew form another. At first glance, Andrew and Chris are semi-absent and semi-present, and their playing is apparently automatic. However, Andrew begins to disappear almost totally: he is physically present but clearly absent in other ways. He and Chris become two separate entities. Your alertness and monitoring of them, possibly more than the others in the group at this moment, creates another alliance, and you momentarily shift your focus to them. And so on. We see here various alliances going on at the same time, some overlapping, some distinct from one another, some polarized. At the same time there is the larger group: despite these subtle shifts

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of alliances between the five of you, what binds you together at the same time is a combination of your collective presence in the room at this time, and the music that is created by the group.

17.3 Being present to absence It is critical not to judge or value presence more than absence. Each may signal that it is you (dear reader) that needs a wake-up call. You may be ‘missing’ something that’s going on in the group – and someone’s ‘behaviour’ carries a message. Also be careful of fragmenting the group in your mind as being on various ‘sides’. Thus, Benet’s presence (in providing the rhythmic ground) is not ‘more important’ or ‘better than’ Andrew and Chris, who are less present. Also, Andrew and Chris, by being less engaged than the rest, are not ‘bad’, ‘insolent’ or ‘uncooperative’ – this is far too simplistic, as is to think of Benet as ‘cooperating’ (because he is ‘doing’ what you want him to do). You need to decode what the acts are telling you. For example, if someone’s not listening, they may be bored – if so, why are they bored? Are you going on a bit? Is it the moment to shift the pace, change the activity? Better still, why not ask them what they think needs changing? If someone is playing, they are apparently being cooperative. Is there another message here? Are they ‘currying favour’ with you; wanting to be seen in alliance with you? I am not saying that you need to become an expert analyst of group behaviour – rather, that you keep an open mind as to what might be going on in your groups. At the same time, though, a part of you is relieved that Benet keeps going and is musically engaged, and you feel impatient with Andrew and Chris who are mentally absent. Let’s reframe the brief of this vignette for a moment, and see what happens to our thinking. Let’s pretend that rather than being a group for self-expression, your brief is, instead, tasked: you have a performance coming up and need these boys to ‘work’. You need to reflect carefully on Andrew and Chris’ behaviours within this revised brief. If the group norms, set up at the beginning of your work together, are now something like: ‘we come to sessions in order to prepare for the performance’, then Andrew and Chris are not fulfilling their part of the group contract. However, long before things come to this sorry state – where you might have to ask them to leave the group, since they are sabotaging the group’s task – you need to be aware of your personal reactions and feelings, and make sense of the group climate, so that you can address issues at a much earlier stage of your work together.

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Your addressing group ‘niggles’ from the start, rather than letting the climate become increasingly uncomfortable for everyone in the group, will generate in the group a feeling of trust in you: a feeling that you are in tune with them even if, overtly, they do not approve of your reprimands. Remember that most acts (and non-acts) have hidden meanings, and that these speak volumes! (You need to hear them, though.) If we think of a different group context – a classroom situation: you walk past a classroom and hear the teacher saying in a rather exasperated voice, ‘I don’t know what the matter with these children is today’. Is it just the children, or is there, possibly, ‘something the matter with’ the teacher too? If as class teacher (or choir leader or music tutor) you’re aware of feeling grumpy and impatient before your session starts, then you need to leave those parts of you ‘at the door’, so to speak, and focus, as best you can, on the moment in hand. This is not always easy, and after all, we are all human. If you’re lucky, your group will give you a chance to focus on them – like the schoolchildren in Chapter 8 who let me know (clearly and firmly) that I was not ‘with it’. Luckily for us all, I heard them.

17.4 Thinking through The way we think about any of the vignettes in this book is determined by our theoretical approach, the tasks of the group and our professional culture. The chances are that music therapists, ensemble conductors, community musicians and music teachers each differ in their thinking about the vignettes. Also, within each of these professional groups, different folk might read these differently – this is what keeps our work alive and uncertain! Similarly, notions of absence and presence in group work can be thought of in a multitude of ways: musically, we might focus on what is sounded and what is not; in personal terms, we might think of absence and presence as having to do with the person’s mood, the quality of their engagement and lack of it; and how they are experiencing the group. If we think interpersonally, then there are implications of absence and presence for the entire group – not just for the person who is not engaging. I want to revisit some of the vignettes to conclude: •

Vignette 8a shows Cherie and Karen giggling and attempting to push each other off their chairs, in your session. Are they absent? Musically speaking, yes, since they are not ‘playing’, and neither are they ‘paying attention’ – so we might think of them as being mentally absent too. Are they only absent? Let’s think of them as

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being present: their acts are happening within the group (since this is an open session, they might have gone and played outside your group space). Perhaps they are present after all – and their acts tell you ‘something’. •

Vignette 8d shows me up as absent, mentally, even though physically present. The group lets me know this by behaving atrociously. Luckily, I get the message, and refocus myself to become totally present. The session shifts into focus for the whole group.

•

Vignette 9a describes the group of Parkinson’s patients mentally and physically present in the moment, and the music does not work. I am present emotionally to myself and to the group, and listen to my own mounting discomfort and anxiety. This enables me to hear Mr B’s comment about ‘playing along with his favourite music’ as a cue, which sets the scene for the next part of the session.

•

Vignette 9e shows a group improvisation in which James’ musical presence masks an interpersonal absence. His music prevents the group from ‘grooving’, and as a result, the rest of the group gradually absent themselves musically.

•

Vignette 10b shows care workers being absent musically and mentally, although physically present. They communicate their lack of enthusiasm, and their mental absence very clearly. This, Jennifer does not quite ‘read’, being a music therapy student, but she knows something needs ‘fixing’ and brings the session to our weekly supervision group.

•

Vignette 11a describes Simon and myself totally present to the group in the ritual for Joe’s death. As a result, we’re able to switch plans without needing to signal to one another during the ritual, and instead, witness the group singing their own songs.

•

Vignette 12c describes Carla absenting herself emotionally in the way that she presents her ‘autobiographical’ choice of the Mozart Horn Concerto. She tells us a tale of a monk’s unrequited love as ‘programme notes’ for our listening to the music. Although as group facilitator, I am aware of her absence, it is not part of my brief, here, to comment on it.

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17.5 Present conclusions and absent certainties Throughout this book we’ve been thinking about how the act of thinking itself influences how we plan our work; how we do it and how we think about it and describe it. In considering absence and presence in this chapter, I am offering tools for thinking about, and describing what might – and might not – have happened in your session. There is nothing too certain or formulaic about these concepts: as I hope you’ve gathered, just because James does one thing, and Andrew (in a different group) does exactly the same thing, this does not mean that both are ‘absent’ and ‘anti-group’. Far from it! You need to ‘read’ the group constantly, and yourself as part of it. You also, of course, need to remember your task, your aims, your roles – and know your limits.

CHAPTER 18

Group Process and the ‘Inner Track’ You might be wondering why this chapter on ‘group process’ is brief, and why it is at the end of the book. This is because most of this book is about group process in the sense of ‘tuning-in’ to ‘what goes on’ in your planning, your ‘doing’ the group and now in reflecting about it. Music groups – of whatever kind – provide opportunities for various relationships to emerge over a period of time. Sub-groups form and fall apart, alliances shift, the group challenges your role as group leader or coheres unexpectedly – and so on. Any of these events can be seen as having to do with interpersonal relationships in groups, which can be cosy, conflicting, erotic, exciting, destructive and immensely challenging. Alertness to ‘the inner track’ is essential, no matter what your brief, your task and how your role is defined. By definition, the group’s ‘inner track’ needs ongoing reflection, which is more than ‘writing up’ after sessions. Group processes are complex, and need your curiosity, exploring, musings. Even if you are not trained in working psychologically, some of the discussions here will, I hope, be helpful in ‘wondering about’ your sessions. Finally I’d like to suggest that the more you manage to reflect and ‘process’ your own work, the less exhausting and the more enriched you will find your work – even the most difficult and awkward groups will keep you interested, while the groups that flow more easily will make you think twice about ‘what’s going on’.

18.1 Structure and directive work Generally speaking, the more structured your sessions, the more ‘taskorientated’, the ‘safer’ your group members will feel (and that includes you as leader). Here, everyone knows what’s what: why they’re here, who’s in what role, what the task is. Your brief may be something like preparing a musical performance for an event, completing the music curriculum syllabus, developing social skills, or whatever. In each of these, the task can be thought of as having an ‘external’ focus, in the sense that the members themselves are not necessarily the main focus of your activities, but rather what they ‘do’. Thus, your focus may be on how the musicians play or sing (rather than how they feel) in a ‘rehearsal’; 213

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or how the class is progressing in terms of ‘learning’ music. Even the social skills group might have to do with ‘role playing’ various ‘parts’ that can be seen as being ‘outside’ group members, and that they are ‘trying on’ for the moment – using role playing as a (drama-therapy) mechanism of ‘distancing’, which certain groups may need. Even in task-oriented group work, you need to set norms! At the very least the norms have to do with time and place of session, frequency of sessions (e.g. once a week or fortnight or month), length of session, punctuality, help with tidying up, contributing to the ‘tea fund’ and so on. You also need to make clear to the group what you are providing and – possibly more important – what you are not providing for the group as group leader. In other words, you may be running a choir in a mental health setting, but you may need to make clear that your brief is musical. Here, if choir members have personal difficulties and need support, then you need to refer them to a counsellor or resident music therapist. Your role needs to be clear, as are the limits of your role: you ‘run’ the session from beginning to end, you are overtly ‘in charge’, and can insist on the tasks – you work in a directive way, and, one hopes, folk feel ‘safe’ in the sense that they feel comfortable with you, with the task and with one another. Even in overtly structured and directive group work, people are people with feelings, attitudes, sensitivities that constantly ebb and flow within each person, and also between them. At the risk of sounding repetitive: remember that one kind of attitude or behaviour is not necessarily ‘good’ or the other ‘bad’! Each tells you something valuable, and is to do with group life. Even the most tightly structured, autocratic and hierarchical group has undercurrents and overtones. Depending on the group norms, and your brief and role as leader, what you ‘do’ about the undercurrents and overtones differs. Thus, where the brief is clearly set, and your norms are something like ‘shape up or ship out’, then it is legitimate to ask members who are obstructing your task to leave the group. In Vignette 17a, for example, playing music was not part of the brief – so it is inappropriate here for the group leader to ask those who are not ‘playing’ to leave the group. The group brief was to do with the session as providing a weekly ‘space’ for the lads to ‘express themselves’. This, as you can see, can be interpreted in a number of ways – and as group leader, you’d do well to spend considerable time negotiating with the four lads as to what your expectations might be, and how you might fulfil these. This section suggests that structured group work may be necessary for a number of reasons – at the very least, to do with your brief, and the tasks of the group. (You may want to refresh your memory by rereading Chapters 2 and 7.)

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At times though, the structure is challenged and your role severely undermined.

18.2 Group phases and points of view If we’re thinking about ‘undercurrents’ in group work, then it is useful to inform ourselves of the work of psychologists and group analysts who have identified group processes and phases that groups generally experience. Foulkes, Bion, Nitsun and Tuckman have written extensively about groups from psychoanalytic perspectives. Here I focus on Tuckman’s model of Group Phases as one way of thinking about undercurrents. First, a note of caution. Nothing in (any aspect of ) group work (or life, for that matter) is as organized and predictable as a linear sequence of phases or processes. In other words, Phase One is not necessarily followed by Phases Two and Three; neither does process ‘a’ mean ‘such and such’. In some ways, it may be more useful to think of phases and processes as representing various aspects of group events, using various kinds of meaning drawn from differing ‘points of view’. Some of these ‘points of view’ overlap at times and contradict one another at other times. Similarly, groups can seem to be moving ‘towards’ and ‘away from’ any one phase at the same time. Finally, to add to confusion, Phase Two is not necessarily ‘more developed’ or ‘better’ than Phase One! What is more useful, perhaps, is to think of Tuckman’s Group Phases as a model to help you to reflect on your work, rather than using it as a model on which to ‘plan’ or ‘execute’ your work. He identified four phases: norming – the initial phase of a group, when folk are invested in gauging what they have in common, how similar they are to one another, and how well they might get on; storming – which may be thought of as the swing of the pendulum in the other direction, where folk are invested in finding how different they are from one another, and there is a striving away from one another and from the group – with some conflict, no matter how subtle; forming – a more realistic coming together, where similarities and differences are a little more ‘realistic’, and the group more able to tolerate and manage discord and difference (as well as similarity); and finally performing. Here the group is ready to ‘get on with the job’, functioning as a ‘group’. This model is convenient in helping you, possibly, to identify and understand your work. At the same time, though, it may be restricting. As with everything in this chapter – and in Part III of this book – these discussions are for you to ‘hold in mind’ when you’re reflecting on your work.

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However, Tuckman’s notions of ‘forming’ and ‘storming’ give us a clue that, even in groups that seem to ‘go according to plan’, there may be forces at work that are subtle and very powerful, effectively sabotaging the group.

18.3 Cohesive and disruptive forces Forces are not magical or esoteric visitations that descend on your group each time you meet! More useful is to think of these as aspects of each one of us that may be unconscious (in other words, that we are not aware of ), that seem to manifest themselves in group work, interfering or greatly enhancing your work together. You need to ‘keep track’. Let’s think again about the teacher in your conflict resolution work with a staff group (Vignette 13e). She’s ‘always late’ (the teachers tell you), and her excuses are plausible and reasonable. Are they? I’d like to suggest that the nuances to do with ‘being late’ are rather complicated, already hinted at throughout this book, when ‘punctuality’ is stated over and again as part of group norms. Lateness implies that the group norms are being challenged – that is, if you’ve set them! If you haven’t, then you’ve little say in anything to do with anyone being late. We all know that lateness is disruptive: the session cannot begin, and the ‘late person’ comes to exercise rather a lot of control over your work. In fact, they seem to be more ‘powerful’ than anyone else in the group! (As an aside, think of how you feel when you sit for ages in a crowded airplane, and are told that you are all ‘waiting’ for one missing passenger.) Being late is one example of what we might think of as an anti-group 1 behaviour. You need to ‘be mindful’ of this as a possibility – although, once again, this doesn’t mean that you need to ‘do’ something. Think about it: this teacher is ‘always late’ but, at the same time, she does come and engages with the group. So – is her ‘lateness’ only an anti-group behaviour? Is it only she who is the anti-group force? Think carefully – we hinted at the group possibly making her the group ‘scapegoat’. Is her engagement with the group not at the same time contributing to group cohesion? These are the kind of complexities that make group work so uncertain, enervating, energizing and rewarding! Coherent and disruptive forces may well operate at the same time, and within the same person – giving rise to feelings of 1

I am aware of oversimplifying pro- and anti-group forces, and of using them interchangeably (and simplistically) with ‘cohesive’ and ‘disruptive’ forces in groups. This is to give you a starting point – and, obviously, is not the ‘whole story’ – which is way beyond the scope of this book!

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ambivalence within each person as well as in the group (and sub-groups) as a whole. There may be both a wish to be ‘a part of’ the group (after all, we saw in Chapter 16 that belonging to groups is essential to our sense of identity), and at the same time, a wish to be ‘independent from’ it. Let’s revisit Chris and Andrew, in Vignette 17a. Is their ‘absence’ necessarily a disruptive group force? And, by default, are David and Benet’s musical engagements pro-group behaviours? (And are you sure of your answer?) What might be useful in your reflections, is to consider each of the four lads as having cohesive and disruptive sentiments, and as being both pro- and anti-group in their behaviours. Having thought about Chris and Andrew in this scenario, and got to a point of reflection that ‘feels’ more or less appropriate, you now need to consider what you ‘do’ with your reflections. Do you need to share your insights with the young lads? Is it part of your brief ? Is it part of your professional skills? I’d like to propose that having insights does not mean that you have to embark on a psychological dialogue with the lads, if this is not your brief. The point about any of this is that these kinds of understandings inform your music-making. In that vignette, the group leader tightens his drumming – which draws all the lads into musical engagement, resulting in momentary group cohesion. Perhaps the only moment of intimacy in the session. His musical act may be informed by these kinds of reflections, which he holds in mind. As a result, he does not stop to ‘reprimand’ the boys, even if he does feel somewhat irritated with them. Reflecting about the session, and on the norms that the group have negotiated, this is what is appropriate – at this moment. Now I want to divert briefly, and consider that group cohesion may be artificial. Just because everyone is musically active may not mean that the group is musically or personally cohesive. Let’s remain with Andrew, Benet, Chris and David for a moment, and consider that the pro- and anti-group forces exist within each member of the group (including you, by the way). Then it is not only Chris whose acts are disruptive. In fact, if we assign all the anti-group forces within Chris, then we risk polarizing and scapegoating him as being the one who is uncooperative, disruptive, and the one who’ll ‘ruin’ the music for everyone. If, instead, we think of his behaviour as portraying something that exists, in this moment, inside each member of the group, we might begin to reflect that his ‘behaviour’ is a beacon, alerting you to how the whole group is experiencing the session. You might need to rethink! And thank Chris for signalling this to you.

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18.4 Who’s the leader? (And who’s following?) Your role as group leader is partly assigned by your employers/funders, and is generally clear to everyone. How clear is your role to you? Here I am thinking about a certain quality in how you execute your role, that the group assigns you. In fact, in this sense, you may be doing the ‘following’. Part of this personal quality has to do with your social identity. Remember that in your work at the nursing home (Vignette 16b) you as group leader ‘resonate’ with Mary – possibly because your personal and social identities have something in common. This ‘resonance’ – which is not only personal and social, but also emotional and relational – affects your role as group leader. In other words, the nuances to do with your role as group leader (and with each member’s role as member of the group) are to do with a whole lot of complicated factors – not the least being that this ‘quality’ is highly context specific. In other words, in the very same work context, with the same brief and with another group, you might experience your role differently. It is this particular combination of people in the group, right here, right now, that engages each of you in a way that is distinctive to that group. Here I want us to think about the role conflict that group members may experience. For example, in your nursing home group, Mary is assertive, charming and fully engaged. You bump into her in the corridor one day, and are surprised to see her shuffling, looking confused, less assertive and less sure of herself than in your sessions. The staff also tell you that as a great-aunt, she is totally at the mercy of her imperious nieces, aged three and five, who run rings around her. I am slightly exaggerating these three situations to remind you of the complexity of our social roles and identities, and how closely context bound these are. Mary may experience these three roles as consonant with one another, in terms of her identity. Let’s say that you, as leader, experience role dissonance. In other words, you find it difficult to be your usual assertive, directive self with Mary. She reminds you of your ‘role’ as a shy withdrawn child at boarding school. Your role as leader is suddenly not quite so certain or clear. Let’s also remind ourselves of Vignettes 13a–d. In each of these, the group leaders’ roles are undermined – for different reasons and in different ways. Any of these kinds of situations will make you rethink. But all of this alerts you to the fact that your role as group leader is not a given – and neither are the roles of the group members as being followers! Even where the hierarchies and structures of your group work are clearly set, keep listening and reflecting – you’ll save yourself an awful lot of headaches (at the very least).

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18.5 Keep listening! The golden rule is simple: listen! Listen carefully. Don’t judge too quickly what you hear or jump to hasty conclusions. Also, don’t instantly try to ‘fix’ discomfort – whether musical or personal. It usually tells you something enormously valuable. At the same time, don’t become obsessed with ‘things going wrong’! Just keep listening!

18.6 Inconclusive thoughts The brevity of this chapter might feel somewhat frustrating. This makes a point: that nothing is as sacred, set in stone, or as literal as it seems. The more you reflect, the more you’ll begin to feel that you know less and less: chaos may be the ‘real’ authenticity in this moment of your session, while the group playing together comfortably may mask something slightly less comfortable. This chapter has stressed, over and again, your need to think about your brief, the aims of your work, the task of the group – and the limits to your skills. Throughout this book, we’ve spoken of setting norms: of being clear with the group as to what you ‘do’ and do not ‘do’; and how what you have to offer can meet their expectations and demands. Here, where you are ‘appointed’ to ‘conduct’ the resident choir, some of this thinking needs to happen with your employers before you accept to do the work! Finally, group work is energizing and stressful. The two go together. Rather like most professionals being expected to keep up with learning – whether through continuing professional development programmes, further formal study or in-service training. As stated earlier, music therapists are expected to have ongoing supervision, usually with a therapist/social worker/psychologist who has a similar frame of theoretical reference as their own. (In other words, the frame of reference does not need to be identical – but there do need to be overlaps, otherwise you could spend a long time checking out assumptions of theory and discourse, rather than honing in on the work itself and your experiences in sessions.) Similarly, you – as community musician, teacher, ensemble leader or choir director – might consider finding a mentor. Someone to accompany you on these fascinating group journeys: someone with superb listening skills, who is not judgemental, who can help you to tease out your thinking and clarify your group strategies. Someone well versed in music matters would certainly be advantageous – but it is better to find someone who feels right for you, personally, than the one with the best ‘credentials’. Good Luck!

CHAPTER 19

Evaluating and Ending Unlike this book, which sets a poor example by talking about evaluation at the very end, evaluation is, ideally, an ongoing process, providing punctuation marks and opportunities for (all of ) you to review your work together, to keep track, and also to think about what needs to be developed, sustained – and changed. Although there is no standard way of evaluating group musicking, this chapter introduces some ideas about why evaluate, what to evaluate and how – and how to think about the evaluation afterwards. The chapter concludes with a brief commentary about coming to the end of working together as a group.

19.1 Evaluate what? (And what’s evaluating)? Anything, everything (and most of the time) is the short answer. Evaluating can be thought of as keeping track of your work on an ongoing basis, or as a more formal procedure at certain intervals, or at the end of your work with a group. Here, evaluating enables you, the group, your funders, line manager or employers to ‘take stock’. In other words, it is a moment of synthesis, where you draw together various aspects of your group work, and then look at your work through a different lens. Also, evaluation does not necessarily mean deciding that the work is good, bad or indifferent but, rather, offers a way of thinking about how the work is developing, what might need to change – and why. If we first consider evaluation as an ongoing event, let’s remember keeping track, discussed in Chapter 7. This is a core music therapy strategy: music therapists keep track constantly, before, during and after sessions. During sessions we keep track of what’s going on, right here, right now, and manage to be both within the session, fully engaged with the client, the music, ourselves, whilst at the same time we monitor, sift and reflect on what is happening from a slightly different position – both in and outside the event. Much of this goes into writing up after sessions, and these notes may form the basis for writing up case

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studies on individual clients, for presenting work at a case conference and for research purposes. We’re seeing that evaluating can be thought of as a regular and systematic writing up of your work, at the end of every group musicking session. Here, you are writing after the session, from another position to that of being in the group during the session. This seems an obvious statement, but think about it. The tricky thing is that in group musicking, you’re a part of what goes on – so that you are both the participant, like your group members, and the observer. Your writing up needs to reflect both stances. The way that you keep track of your work is up to you. I would recommend that you develop a structured way of clustering your notes, with headings such as ‘Structure of session’, ‘Music (prepared)’, ‘Music (new)’, ‘Notes on whole group’, ‘Notes on individual members’ (for smaller groups), ‘Anything unusual’, ‘Other comments’ and ‘Personal reflections’. This helps you to make sense of the session in a specific way – although it can also limit the way that you think about your work. However, the process of keeping track and writing up needs you to remember what happened, and reorganize this information in a systematic way. This needs your descriptive rigour, and the ‘end-product’ can be thought of as a combination of observation notes as well as personal interpretations and reflections. Incidentally, this kind of reporting forms the basis for ethnographic research – developed by anthropologists for recording their observations in the field – in other words, recording what’s ‘out there’ in ‘the field’ (or, in this instance, in the group musicking). Let’s now think of evaluation as something that happens as a specific moment: either at the end of your work with a group, or as a moment of synthesis, punctuating and reviewing the work so far. Here, we can think of evaluation as a formal procedure, and as a given – that we may not even have to think about. For example, if your group musicking culminates in a performance, then that is, in one sense, an evaluation of sorts: the audience’s and the musicians’ responses will signal ‘how’ they have found the performance. But as well as this, you may also need to have a get-together in order to close your work together. This has a slightly different nuance to that of evaluation – but is not as separate as might appear. By closing or de-briefing, the group has an opportunity to reflect on, and talk about, what the group has meant to them, what they have learnt, what they found difficult (and what they can learn from this) and so on. Here, it is useful to revisit the norms/aims that you negotiated together at the beginning of your work, and possibly talk them through one by one.

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Finally, evaluating can be thought of as an attitude or stance towards your work, as well as an event or procedure. I hope you’re evaluating this text as you read it: think about what is useful for you – and why. Think about how you would write a report on this book: how you would organize your thoughts; what you would give prominence to; what you would consider irrelevant. Now think about why you think any of these thoughts. Also, I’d suggest, you need to be courageous enough to evaluate yourself, as reader, as part of the group, and as its leader. Incidentally, formal evaluations are not better than ongoing informal ones. The latter may be far more useful in your work, in the immediate moment, while writing reports is more of a long-term process of collecting and sifting through information.

19.2 Why evaluate? Already we’re seeing that evaluations can have different foci: you may be evaluating for yourself and the group – which I’d call an internal evaluation; or the focus may be external: line managers, employers, funders and so on. Ideally, you need to keep both the internal and external focus in mind when evaluating. External reasons to evaluate include your employers, line managers or funders needing a report of your work so far. You may be applying for an extension of funding, and need to show donors that your work has made a difference to the folk in the group (and that you haven’t wasted their funds). You may be planning next year’s programme, and want a résumé of how this year has gone, and so on. An internal reason may be that you want to crystallize what you have been doing so far, by drawing a line and looking back on the development of the work. This is similar to thinking of your work as a longitudinal study. You may be wanting to write up your work for a project, and want to draw together threads and patterns that are specific to this group and that have emerged over a period of time. You may be wanting to see whether and how your work has been beneficial to the members, and may decide to do a formal assessment at the end of every semester. And so on. Any of these are reasons for evaluating: to review the past, monitor the present, plan for the future; to check, monitor, keep track in a more formal way; to compile reports, plan for the future, to review the past; to write up your work for a paper, a report, a research project (and to publish a book!). What we’re seeing is that formal assessment procedures are not only for external reasons:

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like music therapists, you may decide to use a formal rating instrument in order to assign some kind of value to your work for your own internal purposes.

19.3 How do we evaluate? If you pause to think about what you’ve read so far in this chapter, you’ll see a pattern emerging: I’ve addressed three aspects to do with evaluating: what to evaluate, why, when – and now come to how. This is not a bad structure for thinking about, and planning, your evaluation itself. In other words, if you’re going to do a formal procedure, then think about what you’re wanting to evaluate (and what information you’re needing to do this); why you’re wanting to evaluate; for whom, when you’ll do it, and how. Also – I strongly recommend that you get some help. Before thinking about more formal evaluations, however, I’d like to propose that you probably already evaluate constantly, without thinking about it. In long-term group musicking, especially, you probably regularly check with members how they are ‘finding the session’; whether there are other musical activities they can suggest; whether there is anything else that they would like to sing, play, or ‘do’ in the sessions. As a conductor, you invariably check whether your cues are appropriate and clear enough; while, as a music appreciation group leader, you check whether the volume of recordings needs adjusting, and whether there is other music or kinds of musical genres that your group would like to listen to. In teaching work, you check with students whether the pace is too fast or slow, whether they need a quick break between lectures and so on. Any of these are simple, informal ways of ‘checking’ the group and evaluating as you go along. Also, this signals to the group that you trust and value their comments and judgement, and that you’re inviting them to be a part of how your time together happens. In terms of a more formal evaluation that has an external focus, we need to consider your multiple roles: as group leader, employee and evaluator. A more formal evaluation inevitably involves stepping back and taking a look at your work. You’re more used to doing the work, but suddenly you’re needing to justify your salary, renew your contract, show that your work has value or whatever. Any of these reasons can make you feel uncomfortable as the group leader: after all, you are accountable both to the group and to your line managers/employers/audience; and you are also responsible for the actual session running as smoothly as possible. In other words, you carry a lot of responsibility: to be also carrying out an evaluation is adding rather a lot to your workload.

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One very good reason to seek help from someone outside your work is because you, as group leader, have a vested interest in your own work, so that in your concurrent role as evaluator you may be biased. It may be difficult for you to be a slightly more removed observer at the same time as being the group leader. Also, if part of the evaluation involves group members, then they might find it easier (or more difficult!) to work with someone else, in a formal evaluation. The group may be biased towards you: they may want to please you, to annoy you; they might resist answering questions as fully as possible because of anxieties that their answers have repercussions and so on. I’m not suggesting that bias means that you (or the group members) are dishonest and will purposely elicit only positive or negative information in your evaluation! Not at all! Rather, I am suggesting that it may be more useful for everyone involved in the evaluation to feel able to be critical, in the fullest sense of the word, and to have permission from you to give all-round comments and suggestions. Here we’re touching on critical issues to do with gathering information: how formal and objective the method of collecting information; how personal, and how representative the information will be. Already we’re well into thinking about more formal evaluations.

19.4 What do you want to know? We’ve already been thinking about gathering information in a rigorous and systematic way, and we need to think about how best to do it. Before gathering information, we need to begin at the end of your formal evaluation, i.e. what is the product to be: what is its purpose, how is it to be structured, with what content, and how long? Any one of these influences what information you need to collect, and how you will put it all together at the end of your evaluation. Evaluating your work is beginning to sound more and more like group musicking: it happens within structural contexts that are external to the process itself (Figure 19.1). Also, we’re seeing that information may need to come from various sources. Some of it comes from our writing up at the end of each session; some from staff members and colleagues; some directly from the group members themselves (Figure 19.2). Generally, in any kind of evaluation, you need to consider how best to collect information that is as representative as possible of everything you’ve been doing in your sessions, and that does not compromise your integrity or that of your members.

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Group members Colleagues

Field notes

Evaluation

Past evaluations

Institutional brief Other evaluation instruments

Figure 19.1 Evaluation in context What is becoming clear is that if you are going to the trouble of doing a formal evaluation procedure, then this needs to be context specific, rather than a general, haphazard – and probably rather vague – collecting of information that you might or might not use as research data one of these days. Before thinking about the procedure, remember to begin at the end: what is it that you are being asked to do, by whom and in what format? This book has spent considerable time talking about the choice of discourses for planning, executing and reflecting on your work. Evaluating it is no different! It is no use doing an evaluation that focuses on the psychological aspects of your work, when the report is for a pop musician’s charity which is interested in funding your work and in group members performing at the annual local pop festival! In other words, the end product determines what information you collect; from whom you collect it; how you put it together and what discourse you choose.

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For whom? What do they want to know; why do they need to know it?

For what? External/internal focus; assessing past, present; planning for the future

Collecting Information

How? (The product) Content; length; format; Discourse; presentation

Figure 19.2 Collecting information However, there is a ‘bottom line’ – which is also in keeping with one of the themes of this book (Figure 19.3). You need to evaluate whether and how the norms of your work are congruent with the brief of your work; whether the expectations of your members are congruent with your brief; and whether your work as a group has fulfilled the group’s expectations as well as your brief. In other words, your evaluation is specific to this institution, this group and this period of time. You are not needing to prove to the world that your work is amazing, unique and everyone better get to do the same as you or else they are mediocre. You’re wanting to be systematic, rigorous, show your work in the best possible light, and that includes being up-front about what has not worked, what needs to change and – possibly – what needs major restructuring.

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Group’s expectations

Negotiated norms Aims Tasks Musicking

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Your brief

Figure 19.3 The bottom line

19.5 The focus group evaluation Rather than go through all the possibilities of how to evaluate, I’m going to use the vignettes below as one possibility of evaluating group work: here the scenario is a short-term closed group with a specific brief. Vignette 19a It is the end of a week-long intensive seminar on group improvisation techniques. There are eleven participants to the seminar, many of whom have invested considerable finances, time and energy in attending the seminar. The cost of the course is substantial, some folk have travelled over 1,000 km to attend, and the days have been long. It is time for James to invite the group to evaluate the course together, especially as this is the first such course that James has offered. He needs to justify to the university that its support is justified;the participants found the course useful, and that there is a demand for this kind of short intensive course. One of the other course tutors has been tasked with designing a questionnaire, already handed out to the participants on the penulti-

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mate day. They are due to return the questionnaires to James at the end of this evaluation session. Here we see a dual evaluation happening. The questionnaire is anonymous and private, and allows for members to comment in a way different than the more public group evaluation. Also, parts of the questionnaire will have numerical ratings, in which the members are asked to circle numbers ranking from 1 to 5, where 1 is poor, 3 is adequate and 5 is very good. Other parts will leave space for respondents to comment freely, under various headings. This focus group evaluation is a complement to the questionnaire. Vignette 19b James invites everyone to stand in a large circle, and puts several large blank sheets of flip-chart paper and marker pens on the floor.He gives the group fifteen minutes to think about what aspects of the week need evaluating, and asks that they discuss this amongst themselves, and write different headings on each sheet. He’s going to return a phonecall in his office while they do this, he tells them, and he also reminds the group that he needs them to make sure they cover all aspects that they can think of.

James’ leaving the room is a tactful way of giving the group time and ‘permission’ to decide on the topics. They may feel awkward with him in the room. On the other hand, if the group has negative headings, he is going to have to ‘face the music’ when he returns. His leaving the room may not be such a great idea. Vignette 19c When he returns to the room, he finds that five sheets have headings: Administration, Facilities, Course content, Course tutors and Socializing. James suggests that they now sit in a circle, and that someone be the scribe for each sheet of paper. As a group, they need to ‘brainstorm’ their comments about each of these headings,which the scribe will write. James reminds the group of their earlier discussion about brainstorming, in which they agreed to comment freely, to hear comments without criticism, and also to give both positive and

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negative comments since James needs to file a report to his Head of Department. Wilma then suggests that it might be easier if each of them writes their own comments, rather than the scribe, who will then not feel a part of the evaluation. Caroline says that this will be convoluted with different people bumping into one another as they find their paper. Anthony then suggests that they try the scribe idea first, and if this doesn’t work or if people feel inhibited from saying something and would rather write it, that there is a time for individual written comments at the end. Everyone agrees. Here we see the group negotiating how the evaluation happens, with everyone having a say in the actual procedure. James listens and allows the discussion to continue until the group reaches an agreement as to the best way. He does not dictate or get impatient, although he realizes that the group might agree on a scribing way that is not ideal for him in terms of then having to ‘write up’ all the notes from the various sheets. On the other hand, he realizes that the group needs to feel comfortable with this procedure in order to elicit as much information as possible. Vignette 19d Under Administration, comments include, from the Music Department: ‘good course communication, friendly emails, personal and prompt attention to requests’; and from the Faculty Office: ‘poor information, convoluted registration procedure, confusing use of terms, and too many people to deal with’. Under Facilities, folk agree that the Library staff and facilities get top marks,the room in which they’ve worked is pleasant,the cafeteria is strategically positioned and the musical instruments very good. The toilets are not always clean and there’s often not enough loo paper.

The group is able to give positive as well as negative comments, and James is comfortable with the process so far. He senses that the group is also comfortable.

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Vignette 19e The heading Course content takes the group longer to think through, and James wonders whether the members feel uncomfortable.After a longish silence, he reminds them that the course tutors need constructive criticism – he needs to know what did not work and, also, what suggestions the group might make. Immediately there is a flood of comments, including the need for more pre-composed music, for suggestions as to what might work with their own music groups; advice as to what instruments to buy and where,and that more time is needed in future to review the group improvisations,and then draw up some kind of summary of each improvisation. There is again an awkward silence around Course tutors, and James suggests that perhaps the group would like him to leave the room? There is laughter at this – and the group asks for clarity as to what they can and cannot say.A discussion ensues,in which it emerges that two of the five tutors are clearly the less experienced of the teaching team, and that this ‘showed’ in those sessions that those tutors facilitated alone. James then asks whether the group feels that, in future, only the more experienced tutors should do the sessions. The group suggests, rather, that it might be better to revise the tutoring schedule so as always to have a ‘more’ and a ‘less’ experienced tutor working together. After this discussion, the group then negotiates what to write on the sheet – and agrees on ‘revise teaching schedule’, and ‘revise pairing of more + less experienced tutors’.

With great sensitivity, James has heard the quality of the silence, and this prompts him to remind the group that everyone has permission to be critical in the fullest sense of the word. Also, he facilitates a group discussion, so that the group does not feel that what they say is ‘being recorded’ onto paper. He also suggests that the group negotiates how they want to record their comments.

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Vignette 19f Finally, under the heading Socializing, the group say that they’ve appreciated the fact that they have felt ‘looked after’ by the teaching staff, and that their social evening last night was a wonderful way of meeting one another outside the seminars. The comments include that the seminar has been about much more than learning to improvise, and that they have learnt as much from one another, usually during the social time.They ask whether a list with everyone’s contact details can be circulated, so that they can keep in touch.

James feels especially pleased with this comment since he has put a lot of effort into making sure that folk feel at home and are comfortable, given the costs of the course in terms of time, energy and finances, and given that this is the first time this course has been offered. Vignette 19g James then asks whether,before they conclude the evaluation session, there is anything that the group needs to add – perhaps other topics not covered? The group is silent for a while, and James listens to the silence: it is relaxed and light. Ann then asks why it is that there is only one male student on the course. There is a burst of laughter, and animated discussion as to why this might be so.Anthony,the only male participant, insists that this hasn’t been a problem for him. There is more silence, and James again asks whether there is anything else. There is some quiet giggling, and Sharon then says that yes,she has a suggestion,which is that they finish the session by singing a song together. There is enthusiastic approval, and James finds his thoughts going in various directions: this is as far as the evaluation will go for the moment, and the group may well have said everything they want to say. Possibly, also, whatever else might need to be said is not comfortable for the group at the moment. He then agrees to the group singing a song together, but there is one condition – and as he says this,the group teases him for ‘being in charge’.He laughs,and says that he’ll be in charge, with their permission, for another 20 seconds: he wants to remind them that they still have their questionnaires, and that if they remember anything else they want to add,to write it at the

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end of the questionnaire, in the section entitled ‘Other general comments’. The group agrees,and everyone gets up, puts the evaluation sheets aside and begins to sing. James is alert – and gentle. He does not probe individual members, nor does he insist on everyone speaking. He listens closely to what is said, what is not said, and also to the quality of silences between the speaking. When the group suggests a song, he realizes that this procedure has come to an end – although, once again, he checks whether there might be something not yet raised. He does not insist on this, nor does he break the mood and flow of ‘the ending’. Rather, he reminds them of the other option available, which is to write anything else on the questionnaires. We see here that two kinds of evaluations have happened concurrently. One is an anonymous, individual procedure, where members fill out a specially designed questionnaire, and the other is a focus-group evaluation, where everyone has a say in what areas need to be evaluated, and to voice their opinions. This is a public and ‘transparent’ procedure that allows the group to interact, exchange views and offer a range of comments. While the questionnaire offers possibilities for quantitative summaries of information (Figure 19.4), the focus-group discussions offer rich information that needs to be written up as a part of a report.

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Music Improvisation Seminar Participant Evaluation Since this is a pilot project, we would appreciate as full an evaluation as possible.

Name: ____________________________________________________ How did you hear about this seminar?

__________________________________________________________ Please fill in the brackets provided with assessments 1–5 and fill in written comments. 1= excellent/2= very good/3= good/4= fair/5= poor 1. Course communication: (a) How did you find the communication and information sent before the training? (b) During the course how well did we meet your communication needs? (c) Please comment on the organization of the course

_____________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________ 2. Usefulness for development: (a) How useful was this course for your musical development?

_____________________________________________________ (b) How useful for your professional development?

_____________________________________________________ 3. Role of facilitators. Please evaluate each facilitator in terms of what you found helpful/problematic. (a) Monday morning session (AF + MP) (theory and intro)

_____________________________________________________ (b) Monday afternoon session (DH) (percussion session)

_____________________________________________________ (c) Tuesday morning session (LL) (gamelan)

_____________________________________________________ (d) Tuesday afternoon (AF + MP) (application and closing)

_____________________________________________________

Figure 19.4 The questionnaire

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19.6 What do we do with all this information? Once you’ve gathered the information you need for your report (or whatever kind of evaluation you need to do), then the less fun part of evaluating begins. However, remember that long before you get to having to organize the information, you need to be clear as to why you’re evaluating, what you’re evaluating and for whom. All of this will influence what information you collect and how you then put it together. In terms of James’ focus-group evaluation, he’s writing a report for his Head of Department, to call for the course to continue. He’s left the group to select the topics of the evaluation but, at the same time, he’s also designed a questionnaire that is highly structured: this focus-group evaluation is a complement to a more formal and structured evaluation.

19.7 What to leave out? In the context of more formal evaluations, I’ve not said too much about using your own notes in the above vignettes. In fact, as we draw to the end of this book, you might notice that rather a lot has been left out. As reader, this is unsatisfactory, and you find that this book raises more questions in your mind than you had when you began reading it. This is inevitable. As you evaluate your work, you need to make decisions as to what you will not include – and justify these decisions, again, on the basis of the brief, the purpose and the recipients of your evaluation.

19.8 End notes: How to end We’re drawing to the end of this book, and I’ve not said much about the end of working together as a group. Already, as you’ve read the chapter, you’ll have picked up allusions to the work coming to an end. As you’ve read more and more of the book, you’ll also have noted that there are not many pages left to read. The end of the book will be on your mind quite a bit before the end of the book actually materializes: you might begin noticing that things have been left out, there hasn’t been enough of this, and am I going to mention ‘closing’ at all? Group musicking is no different. According to your brief and your contract, you and your members will have negotiated the aims of your work together, you’ll know how frequently you meet for group musicking, and also know the duration of this group. Whether your work together culminates in a performance, in end-of-year exams, or whether there is no event to mark the culmination, group members – including yourself – will have feelings about the end ap-

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proaching. The feelings may be a mixture of relief, sadness, excitement, annoyance. You may have done particularly good work with a group, and feel a sense of loss that this kind of work may never be repeated again, and you have learnt an enormous amount. Other groups you can’t wait to be rid of, and you find yourself thinking that life will be quite a lot easier without them. All of these are part of group musicking. And, as you’ll know by now, these overtones and undercurrents need to be monitored, reflected upon and ‘held in mind’ during the closing stages of your work together. With ongoing, open-ended group work, although there is no ending in the formal sense, there are punctuations and interruptions as a result of holidays or your annual leave. You need to be clear with the group regarding when there will be no sessions, and then remind the group, every week, that after ‘x’ number of sessions there will be a break of ‘x’ number of weeks. This is part of respecting the group members’ feelings (whether you think that these might be positive or negative is beside the point), and also of preparing them, in the emotional and relational sense, for the absence of the regular session. You may also want to consider an ending ritual – and this can be discussed and planned together with your group, as part of group musicking! This might be as uncomplicated as everyone bringing a plate of eats and something to drink, for a ‘closing party’; each person bringing their favourite piece of music to share with the group; or going out together as a group for a meal. Obviously, this depends on the context in which you work – the latter may not be possible if you work in a prison or with young children, but the principle is the same. In other words, ending needs preparation and needs to be acknowledged. After all, you would not feel very satisfied, as reader, if I ended the book right here, now, in this manner.

In Conclusion This book opened with a vignette describing music that alienated a group, and instantly created fault lines according to culture, ethnicity, region and socio-economic status. This was not the intention of the young men who proudly set their ghetto blaster in our midst, in the middle of the African night. Their music might, instead, have been a bonding experience – culminating in our purchasing the recording as soon as we reached home, so as to remember this night in the wilderness. This was not so – and the reasons are complex. We cannot say that the music itself was unfamiliar, in fact, rather the opposite! Its musical grammar, syntax, and associations were each perfectly familiar. Possibly too familiar? It reminded us of social spaces that my companion and I wished to forget, after our holiday in the African bush. If we reframe this event within a social context, we see a grand collision of cultural perceptions and social norms. The young fellows wanted to welcome us into their fold, and music was a way of conveying their familiarity with ‘our’ social norms. To them we were from the city, complete with Raybans, credit cards and Land Rover – even if we were fairly bedraggled after three weeks of roughing it in the African ‘bush’ (I suspect our bedragglement reeked of city comforts in any case). The ghetto blaster and the ‘disco’ music symbolized their familiarity with our culture, with associations of ‘hard cash’ needed to purchase these symbols; and the urban-ness of the musical genre. After all ‘discos’ generally happen in urban spaces. It was a splendid ‘difference of minds’! Nothing felt less appropriate, seated around a grass mat on the ground, managing to commune with one another, albeit haltingly. The music felt ‘wrong’, out of place and inappropriate – it almost felt insulting. And splendidly exposed the social fragility of our meeting. From our city slickness, sitting in quiet, dark Africa was bliss. To them it was everyday mundane living. We, the ‘urban exotics’, needed to be shown that they too had access to our city culture.

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Here is a complex musical and social situation, which is – inevitably – an infuriating legacy of hundreds of years of colonial social divisions and unfamiliarity, based on labels of ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’. However, there is a sub-text to all this in terms of this book. Group musicking is about much more than having music in common – and in any case, living in Africa renders this statement rather too bland. Flowing together as persons is about musicking in the sense that our acts of being and engaging with one another musick us towards one another. The shift from being together to listening, singing, dancing and making music together is negligible. Possibly, the disco music in the bush did not ‘work’ because we had not been engaging with the young men before the musicking happened. They arrived and imposed the music intrusively on a group engaged in another kind of communing altogether. This book has been about musicking in groups, in a way that receives the other person, learns from them and offers something of ourselves. It has assumed that you have a passion for music of all kinds, in all kinds of contexts and with all kinds of people. This book has also spoken to your imagination, with an invitation to enliven your capacity for the inner tracking of your work: that curious ongoing narrative and imaging that speaks to us if and when we are able to listen – a kind of listening that is, I believe, basic to all creative work and play. The second vignette in this book describes Zandile and me attempting to liven up a deadly dull conference dinner. There was a distinct whiff of disapproval at our performance. I found out afterwards that we contravened some regional taboo (we were in a fairly rural area of the country): for me to be standing on stage with a young man singing the song that we sang was not on. I am still not sure why. In contrast, when the nurses and I got going, this was fine – we were all women. Curiously, when the whole group got going, men joined us too. I still do not understand these social complications – in the same way that the young men in Malawi surely did not understand our request for listening to the ‘bush’ sounds and the brilliant African sky. The social context for each musicking was inappropriate – although at the conference dinner, the nurses created a socially appropriate context for all of us to participate in musicking. Thus, it was not just the music (as object) that mattered, but rather, who, how and what we musicked, and this was specific to that moment, and to that context. Many of the stories in this book may have been in contexts that are unfamiliar to you, and I hope that this has not discouraged you, or dissuaded you from reading further. You may also feel annoyed at

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the lack of examples, the lack of formulae, the absence of concrete suggestions and guidelines about ‘how to’ do it, and ‘when to do this and not that’. Musicking doesn’t quite work that way. The title of this book is explicit: Groups in Music tells us that it is in the act of musicking that groups become themselves, engaging us with one another and with ourselves. This becoming is an ongoing, unfolding event and, like music, is not transferable from one context to another. My act of becoming with one group is very different to that with another. For me to have offered you formulae would have been irresponsible. Rather, I have offered, I hope, another voice: one that encourages you to play, to play with ideas, to play with thoughts and images and to take these seriously. These are the voices of our muses and possibly, also, the muses of the group, exhorting us, as group facilitators, to dare, to try, to risk something other. Something we hadn’t thought of doing until this moment. Finally, this book has been an inner tracking. It has presented various strategies from music therapy, and ongoing commentaries on a range of group musickings while hiding in the wings, behind the door, under the piano, in your pocket – and it has held all of this in mind, and, I hope, put it in yours, or at the very least, next to your mind. All that remains is for you to listen.

Recommended Reading Introduction: Music, Society and Shifting Music Therapy Ansdell, G. (2002) Community music therapy and the winds of change. [online] Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy 2, 2. www.voices.no/mainissues/Voices2(2)ansdell.html. Aigen, K. (1999) ‘The true nature of music-centered music therapy theory.’ British Journal of Music Therapy 13, 2, 77–82. Aigen, K. (1998) Paths of Development in Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona. DeNora, T. (2000) Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gouk, P. (ed.) (2000) Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts. Aldershot: Ashgate. Ruud, E. (1998) Music Therapy: Improvisation, Communication and Culture. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona. Small, C. (1998) Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press. Stige, B. (2002) Culture-Centered Music Therapy. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona.

PART I PLANNING 1. Planning Our Discourses Ansdell, G. (1997) ‘Musical elaborations: What has the new musicology to say to music therapy?’ British Journal of Music Therapy 11, 2, 36–44. Billington, R., Hockey, J. and Strawbridge, S. (1998) Exploring Self and Society. Houndmills: Palgrave. Bunt, L. And Hoskyns, S. (eds) (2002) The Handbook of Music Therapy. Hove: Brunner-Routledge. Cook, N. (1990) Music, Imagination and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, P. J. (1995) Sounds and Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pavlicevic, M. (1999) ‘With listeners in mind: Creating meaning in music therapy dialogues.’ The Arts in Psychotherapy 26, 2, 85–94. Russell, B. (1961 (1946)) History of Western Philosophy. London: Routledge. Ruud, E. (1988) ‘Music therapy: Health profession or cultural movement?’ Journal of the American Association of Music Therapy 7, 1, 34–7.

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Scruton, R. (1981) A Short History of Modern Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge. Stige, B. (1998) ‘Perspectives on meaning in music therapy.’ British Journal of Music Therapy 12, 1, 20–27.

2. Institutions, Idiosyncrasies and the Larger Picture Daft, R. L. (1992) Organization Theory and Design. Saint Paul, MN: West Publishing Company. De Board, R. (1978) The Psychoanalysis of Organizations. London: Routledge. Gibson, J., Ivancevich, I. and Donnelly, J. (eds) (2000) Organizations: Behavioral Structures and Processes. Boston: McGraw Hill. Gabriel, Y. (1999) Organizations in Depth. London: Sage. Kets de Vries, M. (ed.) (1991) Organizations on the Couch. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Lewin, K. (1951) Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper & Row. Obholzer, A. and Roberts, V. Z. E. (1994) The Unconscious at Work: Individual and Organisational Stress in the Human Services. London: Routledge. Roberts, J. and Pines, M. (eds) (1991) The Practice of Group Analysis. London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge.

3. In-groups, Out-groups, Norms and Membership Barnes, B., Ernst, S. and Hyse, K. (eds) (1999) An Introduction to Groupwork. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. Benson, J. F. (1987) Working More Creatively with Groups. London: Routledge. Forinash, M. (ed.) (2001) Music Therapy Supervision. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona. Thompson, S. (1998) The Group Context. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Tuckman, B. (1965) ‘Developmental sequences in small groups.’ Psychological Bulletin 63, 6, 384–99. Yalom, I. D. (1983) Inpatient Group Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. Yalom, I. D. (1995) The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. 4th edition. New York: Basic Books.

4. Instrumental Thinking and Sound Thoughts Bunt, L. and Hoskyns, S. (eds) (2002) The Handbook of Music Therapy. Hove: BrunnerRoutledge. Hargreaves, D. J. and North, A. C. (eds) (1997) The Social Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Neill, S. A. (1997) ‘Gender and music.’ Hargreaves and North, 46–63.

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O’Neill, S. A. and Boulton, M. J. (1995) ‘Is there a gender bias towards musical instruments?’ Music Journal 60, 358–9. Wylie, J. (1996) Music, Learning and Your Child. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press.

5. On Being Formed by Music Cook, N. (1998) Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DeNora, T. (2000) Music in Everyday life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frith, S. (1996) Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hargreaves, D. J. and North, A. C. (eds) (1997) The Social Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Juslin, P. and Sloboda, J. (eds) (2001) Music and Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, P. J. (1995) Sounds and Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sloboda, J. (1985) The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

6. Considering the Music Space Bunt, L. and Hoskyns, S. (eds) (2002) The Handbook of Music Therapy. Hove: Brunner-Routledge. Pavlicevic, M. (1987) ‘Reflections on the pre-musical moment.’ British Journal of Music Therapy 1, 1, 22–4. Stern, D. (1985) The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books.

7. Aims, Tasks, Roles and the Outer Track Benson, J. F. (1987) Working More Creatively with Groups. London: Routledge. Blacking, J. (1976) How Musical is Man? London: Faber & Faber. Daft, R. L. (1992) Organization Theory and Design. Saint Paul, MN: West Publishing Company.

PART II EXECUTING 8. Forming Groups and Groups Forming Ansdell, G. (1995) Music for Life: Aspects of Creative Music Therapy with Adult Clients. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Bunt, L. (1994) Music Therapy: An Art Beyond Words. London: Routledge. Nordoff, P. and Robbins, C. (1977) Creative Music Therapy. New York: John Day. Pavlicevic, M. (1994) ‘Between chaos and creativity: music therapy with traumatised children in South Africa.’ Journal of British Music Therapy 4, 2, 5–9.

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Pavlicevic, M. (1997) Music Therapy in Context. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

9. Group Flow, Group Pulse – Finding the Groove Czicksenmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Davis, G. and Magee, W. (2001) ‘Clinical improvisation within neurological disease.’ British Journal of Music Therapy 15, 2, 51–60. Keil, C. and Feld, S. (eds) (1994) Music Grooves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Magee, W. (1999) ‘“Singing my life, playing my self”: Music therapy in the treatment of chronic neurological illness.’ In T. Wigram and J. De Backer (eds) Clinical Applications of Music Therapy in Developmental Disability, Paediatrics and Neurology. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 201–23. Pavlicevic, M. (1995) ‘Sounding into growth and growing into sound: improvisation groups with adults.’ The Arts in Psychotherapy 22, 4, 359–67.

10. Whose Group? Whose Music? (and Whose Expectations?) Achenbach, C. (1997) Creative Music in Groupwork. Bicester: Winslow Press Ltd. Oldfield, A. and Bunce, L. (2001) ‘“Mummy can play too…” Short-term music therapy with mothers and young children.’ British Journal of Music Therapy 15, 1, 27–36. Wylie, J. (1996) Music, Learning and Your Child. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press.

11. Group Rituals Pavlicevic, M. (1995) ‘Transforming a violent society.’ Human Development 16, 2, 39–42. Roose-Evans, J. (1994) Passages of the Soul: Rediscovering the Importance of Rituals in Everyday Life. Shaftesbury: Element. Small, C. (1998) Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press. Mitchell, S. (1999) ‘Reflections on dramatherapy as initiation through ritual theatre.’ In A. Cattanach (ed.) Process in the Arts Therapies. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 10–35.

12. Live Meanings – Listening to Music Aiello, R. and Sloboda, J. (eds) (1994) Musical Perceptions. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Becker, J. (2001) ‘Anthropological perspectives on music and emotion.’ In P. N. Juslin and J. A. Sloboda (eds) Music and Emotion: Theory and Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 135–60.

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Bunt, L. and Pavlicevic, M. (2001) ‘Music and emotion: Perspectives from music therapy.’ Juslin and Sloboda, 161–201. Bruscia, K. (1995) ‘Modes of consciousness in Guided Imagery in Music (GIM): a therapist’s experience of the guiding process.’ In C. Kenny (ed) Listening, Playing, Creating: Essays on the Power of Sound. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cook, N. (1990) Music, Imagination and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, N. (1998) Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erdomnez Grocke, D. (1999) ‘The music which underpins pivotal moments in Guided Imagery in Music.’ In T. Wigram and J. De Backer (eds) Clinical Applications of Music Therapy in Psychiatry. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 197–210. Juslin, P. and Sloboda, J. (eds) (2001) Music and Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lowis, M. J. and Touchin, C. (2002) ‘An investigation into music found to trigger peak emotional experiences during controlled listening experiments.’ British Journal of Music Therapy 16, 1, 35–45. Roose-Evans, J. (1994) Passages of the Soul: Rediscovering the Importance of Rituals in Everyday Life. Shaftesbury: Element. Sloboda, J. (1985) The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sloboda, J. (1999) ‘Music – where cognition and emotion meet.’ The Psychologist 12, 9, 450–5.

13. Team Building and Conflict Resolution Campbell, J., Liebmann, M., Brooks, F., Jones, J. and Ward, C. (eds) (1999) Art Therapy, Race and Culture. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Levine, S. and Levine, E. (eds) (1998) Foundations of Expressive Arts Therapies. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Liebmann, M. (ed) (1996) Arts Approaches to Conflict. London and Bristol, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Naor, Y. (1999) ‘The theatre of the Holocaust.’ In S. Levine and E. Levine (eds) Foundations of Expressive Arts Therapy. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 223–39. Nitsun, M. (1996) The Anti-Group. London and New York: Routledge. Pavlicevic, M. (1995) ‘Transforming a violent society.’ Human Development 16, 2, 39–42. Pavlicevic, M. (1999) ‘Music therapy improvisation groups with adults: Towards de-stressing in South Africa.’ South African Journal of Psychology 29, 2, 94–9.

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PART III REFLECTING 14. How Formed is Your Listening (and How Informed is Your Speaking)? Aiello, R. and Sloboda, J. (eds) (1994) Musical Perceptions. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deutsch, D. (ed.) (1982) The Psychology of Music. New York: Academic Press. Juslin, P. and Sloboda, J. (eds) (2001) Music and Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sloboda, J., Davidson, J. W. and Howe, M. J. A. (1994) ‘Is everyone musical?’ The Psychologist 7, 7, 349–54.

15. Persons as Music (and Finding the Groove) Bruscia, K. (1987) Improvisational Models of Music Therapy. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas. Condon, W. S. and Ogston, W. D. (1966) ‘Sound film analysis of normal and pathological behaviour patterns.’ Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases 143, 4, 338–47. Malloch, S. N. (2000) ‘Mothers and infants and communicative musicality.’ Musicae Scientiae (special issue 1999–2000), 29–58. Nolan, C. (1987) Under the Eye of the Clock. Pan Books. Papousek, H. and Papousek, M. (1987) Intuitive Parenting: a dialectic counterpart to the infant’s integrative competence. In D. O. Osofsky (ed) Handbook of Infant Development (2nd edition), pp. 669–720. Pavlicevic, M. (1997) Music Therapy in Context. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Pavlicevic, M. (1999) Music Therapy – Intimate Notes. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Schogler, B. (1998) ‘Music as a tool in communications research.’ Nordic Journal of Music Therapy 7, 1, 40–9. Trevarthen, C. (2000) ‘Musicality and the intrinsic motive pulse: evidence from human psychobiology and infant communication.’ Musicae Scientiae (special issue 1999–2000), 155–215. Trevarthen, C. and Malloch, S. N. (2000) ‘The dance of wellbeing: Defining the musical therapeutic effect.’ Nordic Journal of Music Therapy 9, 2, 3–17.

16. Group Music, Identity and Society Aldridge, D. (1996) Music Therapy Research and Practice in Medicine. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Billington, R., Hockey, J. and Strawbridge, S. (1998) Exploring Self and Society. Houndmills: Palgrave.

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Hargreaves, D. J. and North, A. C. (eds) (1997) The Social Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Magee, W. and Davidson, J. W. (2000) Identity In Chronic Neurological Disability: Finding An Able ‘Self’ In Music Therapy. Sixth International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Keele, UK. MacDonald, R., Hargreaves, D., and Miell, D. (eds) (2000) Musical Identities. Oxford: Oxford Universiry Press. Ruud, E. (1998) Music Therapy: Improvisation, Communication and Culture. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona. Zillmann, D. and Gan, S. (1997) ‘Musical taste in adolescence.’ In D. J. Hargreaves and A. C. North (eds) The Social Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 161–87.

18. Group Process and the Inner Track Barnes, B., Ernst, S. and Hyse, K. (eds) (1999) An Introduction to Groupwork. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan. Bion, W. R. (1961) Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock. Foulkes, S. H. (1975) Group Analytic Psychotherapy. Methods and Principles. London: Gordon and Breach. Nitsun, M. (1996) The Anti-Group. London and New York: Routledge. Roberts, J. and Pines, M. (1991) The Practice of Group Analysis. London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge. Thompson, S. (1998) The Group Context. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Tuckman, B. (1965) ‘Developmental sequences in small groups.’ Psychological Bulletin 63, 6, 384–99. Yalom, I. D. (1995) The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy. 4th edition. New York: Basic Books.

19. Evaluating and Ending Ansdell, G. and Pavlicevic, M (2001) Beginning Research in the Arts Therapies: A Practical Guide. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Daft, R. L. (1992) Organization Theory and Design. Saint Paul, MN: West Publishing Company. Gibson, J., Ivancevich, I. and Donnelly, J. (eds) (2000) Organizations: Behavioral Structures and Processes. Boston: McGraw Hill. Robson, C. (1993) Real World Research. Oxford: Blackwells.

Subject Index

closed groups 52–3 cognitive skills 93 communicative musicality 183–6 community arts group instrument-making 62–3 norm-setting 49–50, 51–2 community music discourses 25, 29 primary and secondary aims 94 Community Music Therapy 16–17 concerts Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan 146–8, 159 symphony concert, South Africa 134–6 conducting 88 conflict resolution/team building 167–72, 216 conversation 183–4 cueing 88 culture, and choice of music 67–8 cycles, working and playing 69–70

absence and presence 114, 205–12 being present to absence 209–10 shifting alliances 208–9 thinking through 210–11 Africa cultural sensitivity in music selection 67 disco in the bush 13–14, 236–7 end-of-conference ‘party’ 19–20, 237 greetings 35 see also South Africa African Symphony 135 age, and choice of music 67 aims and briefs clarity 98–9 external 95–7 group 91–5 healing ‘ritual’ 142 and response to undercurrents and Disabled Baby Centre group overtones 209, 214 absence and presence 211 allowing 89 hidden group outside 130–2 anti- and pro-group forces 164, 216–17 split focus 129–32 whose music? 134 behavioural psychology 98 discourses binary form 77–8 and aims 98–9 Brandenburg Concerto (Bach) 154–5 and evaluation 225 planning 23–31 and reflecting 181–2 calendar year, and choice of music 68, double groups see multi-groups 69–70 changing 90 choirs 24, 84, 86, 140 emotional space 80–1 symphony concert, South Africa enabling 89 135–6 ending 90, 234–5 who’s running this show? 164–5 ‘Englishman in New York’ 67 church music ‘entrainment’ 180 discourses 28 ethnographic research 221 in- and out-groups 162–3, 167 evaluation 220–34 see also Evensong; funeral service evaluate what? 220–2 clinical/musical intervention 110–11 focus group 227–323 246

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how do we evaluate? 223–4 and musical acts 110 one-off groups 47 group expectations, and negotiated what do you want to know? 224–7 norms 50 what do to with information 234 group forming and re-forming 103–114 what to leave out 234 becoming a group 103–7 why do we evalute? 222–3 musical thinking 107–11 Evensong 149, 159 ‘receiving’ the persons 111–13 split-second musicking 113–14 group leaders/facilitators facilitating 89 effects of ‘flops’ 165–7 ‘flops’ 161–2 roles 87–9, 200, 218 effects on group leader 165–7 as symbols of authority 42 in- and out-groups 162–3 tasks 89–91 sticking to the plan 163 group membership who’s in charge? 163–4 removing members 44–5, 214 who’s running this show? 164–5 selecting members 43–4 flow 115–24 asynchronies/falling apart 115–19 group norms see norms and norm-setting group phases (norming, storming, flowing and grooving 190–2 forming, performing) 46, 121, learning from non-flowing 119–22 215–16 and musical perception 180–1 group process and dynamics 45–6, negotiating 183–6 85–6, 213–19 spotting 186–7 cohesive and disruptive forces unflowing roles 122–4 216–17 focus group evaluation 227–33 group phases and points of view following 90 215–16 Four Seasons 152, 153, 155 keep listening 218 free improvisation structure and directive work binary and ternary form 77–8 213–15 structureless 78 who’s the leader? 218 funeral service 159 group self, primacy in Africa 15 group structure, and musical structure 75 Gestalt psychology 176 Group Theory 45, 111 Ghazzals 147 groups ‘Greensleeves’ 175–6 and individuals 23–4 groove 115, 187 guiding 88, 89 creating 186–7 finding 115–24 flowing and grooving 190–2 physical disability and 187–90 group aims and briefs 91–5 group cohesion artificiality 217 double groups 125–7

health, identity and 197–8 holding 90 Horn Concerto (Mozart) 151–2, 211

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identity and choice of songs 204 and health 197–8 and music 198–9 shifts and stabilities 193–5 sounding ourselves 200–1, 202–4 stereotypes 195–6 who’s who 199–200 improvisation 24 absence and presence 211 changing/exchanging instruments 64 group flowing and grooving 191–2 and interactive capacity 186–7 learning from not-flowing 119–22 perceptual prominence 179–81 spontaneity 74 unflowing roles 122–4 see also free improvisation indexical experience 154 in-groups and out-groups 41–3, 162–3 inner track 27, 91, 96, 97, 106–7, 203, 237 institutional context 32–9 and aims of group musicking 91, 92, 95 and choice of music 68 getting trapped 38–9 the group outside 130–2 and marketing strategy 98 mission, visions and values 33–4 and music space 85 staff, hierarchies and power 35–8 systems 32–3 instruments 56–65 cultural/religious taboos 68 making 62–3 people and 60–1 personal property 63–4 range and sound thinking 58–60 sound advice 56–8 ‘interactional synchrony’ 120, 185 see also flow; groove

intervening 90 keeping track 99, 220–1 ‘Kumbayah, Ma’ Lord’ 199 language, social construction 28–9 leading 88, 89 listening, group leader’s task 90, 219 listening to music 146–60 making sense of music 175–6 musical grammar 178–9 ownership and meaning 149–56 perceptual grouping 177 social context 146–9 listening exercise 156–8 listening skills 93 long-term groups 48 March music 107–10 marketing strategy 98 meaning, of music 149–56 association for listeners 155–6 direct 153–4 episodic 152–3, 155–6 grammatical 153 iconic and symbolic 154–5 music and social context 146–9 prescribed 151–2 meaning, social construction 27–8 mental space 80 mentors 42, 46, 96, 97, 165, 219 Messiah (Handel), ‘scratch’ performance 54 monitoring 89 motherese 184–5 mothers-and-toddlers group group cohesion 125–7 thanking ritual 139–40 whose music? 133–4 whose session? 127–9 Mr Tambourine Man 70 multi-groups/double groups 125–37 group cohesion 125–7

SUBJECT INDEX

hidden groups outside 130–2 split focus 129–30 volunteer group 132–3 whose music? 133–4 whose session? 127–9 music identity and 198–9 ‘ownership’ 70–1, 133–4, 149–51 persons as 190–2 predictability and spontaneity 73–4 and society 13–20, 66–9 specific brief/aims 92 structure 74–8 and you 71–3 see also listening to music music and communication skills 93 music education discourses 25, 29 primary and secondary aims 94 music space 79–86 limits of time, place and person 85–6 pre-music space 79–82 tuning in to 82–3 vitality affects 83–4 music therapy awareness of inner track 97 contributions to group music-making 17, 26–7 definition 26 discourses 25, 29 keeping track 220–1 musical thinking 107–11 primary and secondary aims 94 shifts in thinking and practice 15–17 musical biographies 151–6 emotional absence 211 musical grammar 178–9 musical signals 88 musical thinking 107–11 ‘musicking’ 17

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New World Symphony (Dvorjak) 155 Nordoff-Robbins approach 138 norms and norm-setting 47, 48, 49–52, 219 and avoiding ‘flops’ 164 and response to undercurrents and overtones 209, 214 task-oriented groups 214 Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan concert 146–8, 159 one-off groups 47 difficulty 172 open groups 53–4 orchestras group members conducting 88 and ‘ownership’ of music 71 symphony concert, South Africa 135–6 tuning rituals 140 ostinato 76–7 paediatric orthopaedic ward absence and presence 210–11 becoming a group 105–7 group leader’s role 89 limits of time, place and person 85–6 pre-music space 79–82 tuning in to music 82–3 Parkinson’s patients group absence and presence 211 ‘falling apart’ and repairing 116–18 patterning 177 perceptual grouping 176–8 perceptual prominence 179–81 perceptual psychology 175 performances explicitly musical aims 95 providing familiarity 75 rituals 140 semi-open groups 54–5 Peter and the Wolf 152, 153

250

GROUPS IN MUSIC

physical disability, and ‘grooving’ 187–90 physical space 80 play 18 ‘pre-musical silence’ 120, 122 predictability 73 privacy vs. ‘publicness’ 15–16 professional territories 25–7 psychiatric hospital staff, hierarchies and power 37 psycho-geriatric wards ‘Christmas ritual’ 143–4 record keeping see keeping track religious calendar, and choice of music 68 religious contexts 17–18 religious rituals 139 residential nursing home role and identities 199–204, 218 see also Parkinson’s patients group rituals 138–45 developing 140–3 emerging 139–40 ending ritual 235 imposing 143–4 social, and group music 139 roles conflicts 218 ebb and flow 137 exchanging instruments 64 group leaders 87–9, 200, 218 and identities 194 rondo form 76 ‘sacred’, in the secular 17–18, 144–5 schools 24, 86 absence and presence 210, 211 physical disability and ‘grooving’ 188–90 ‘receiving’ the persons 112–13 rituals 138 split-second musicking 113–14

who’s running this show? 164–5, 166 see also special school; teachers semi-open groups 54–5 short-term groups 48 social bonding 14, 68, 104 social context music and 146–9, 237 rituals and 138 social/life skills 92 social rituals and group music 139 musical choices 158–9 social space 68, 80 society group music, identity and 193–204 music and 13–20, 66–9 songs and finding the groove 117–18 ownership 70–1, 133–4 and social/cultural belonging 150–1, 204 South Africa 14–16 concert performance 134–6 group healing ‘ritual’ 141–3 musical ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’ 150–1 ‘sacred’ in the secular 17–18, 144–5 teacher in-service training 163–4 special school musical thinking 107–11 spontaneity 73–4 spontaneous structure 77 staff and colleagues 35–8 stereotypes 195–6 stress-management group sticking to the plan 163, 166–7 structureless form 78 sub-cultures, and choice of music 68 sub-groups 24, 113–14 generated by music 149 pediatric ward 85, 104

SUBJECT INDEX

shifting nature 40–1, 124, 137 supervision 39, 42, 219 sustaining 90 symphony concert, South Africa 134–6 Systems Theory 32–3 task-oriented groups 213–15 teachers conflict resolution/team building 167–72 in-service training, who’s in charge? 163–4, 165, 166 team building/conflict resulution 167–72 ternary from 77–8 theme-and-variations 77 theoretical discourses 98–9 time, African vs. Western understanding 16 tuning in 82–3 Under the Eye of the Clock (Nolan) 187–8 University of Pretoria 15 verse-and-chorus form 76 verse-only form 76 visualization 152 conflict resolution/team building group 168–9, 169–70 vitality affects 83–4 volunteer group 132–3 emerging ritual 140 whose music? 134 witnessing 90 Working More Creatively with Groups (Benson) 49 young offenders absence and presence 207–10 anti- and pro-group forces 217

brief, norms and response to undercurrents and overtones 209, 214 stereotypes 196

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Author Index Achenbach, Chris 126 Aigen, Ken 16 Ansdell, Gary 16

Verney, Rachel 16 Wylie, Julie 128 Yalom, Irvin 41

Becker, J. 150 Benson, Jalrath 49 Blacking, John 97 Bunt, L. 26 Davidson, J. W. 197 De Board, R. 32 Feld, Steven 187 Hoskyns, S. 26 Keil, Charles 115, 187 Lewin, Kurt 32 Magee, W. 197 Nolan, Christopher 187-8 Papousek, H. and M. 184 Pavlicevic, M. 122 Ruud, Even 16-17, 198 Sloboda, John 75, 150 Smart, Christopher 17, 139 Stern, Daniel 83 Stige, Brynjulf 16-17 Trevarthen, Colwyn 184 Tuckman, B. 46, 215-16

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