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music therapy Tag

Blog Topic – Job Market

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

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

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

Mark

Songwriting is used often in music therapy. Therapists often write individualized songs for clients which fit each client’s specific needs at the time. Songwriting is also used by music therapists as an intervention where they get the clients to write their own songs. It provides an outlet for clients to express themselves.

5 Tips to Good Songwriting:
Write the melody without an instrument
Put a fresh, unexpected chord in the melody
Use simple words
Use Repetition
Use lots of action and imagery in the lyrics

Mary Jane

Improvisation is a free performance done with little or no preparation. It is often seen in Jazz music and in Eastern traditional music. The differences between a composed song and an improvised song is that the improvised song is not written and it takes place in real time. Improvisation can be individual or it can be a group activity.

Studies show that “improvisational music therapy was more effective at facilitating joint attention behaviors and non-verbal social communication skills in children than in play (with toys, etc).”  It also has been shown to produce “significantly more and lengthier events of eye contact and turn-taking.” (Kim, Wigram, Gold, 2008.)

How does this work? This video gives a great explanation. MRI results show that when a person is improvising, the same area of the brain used in speech and social communication is lit up.

I have personally seen the power of improvisation in real life.  I have seen people who have difficulty communicating through speech improvise on an instrument and the music is powerful and full of emotion.  It’s as if those people have a lot to say just waiting inside of them but they cannot always express it through speech.  Improvisation gives them the opportunity to communicate and express emotion in alternate ways.

Mary Jane

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

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

Mark