Music Speaks And So Do Music Therapists! Part Three Of Our Conversation With Elizabeth Schwartz, LCAT, MT-BC

The final part of our conversation with music therapist, Elizabeth Schwartz!

Kat: "Concerning the trickle down that's supposed to be happening from the current work and getting into the educational space...I feel like that is kind of commonplace. We are the boots, we are the hands and the feet, so sometimes when we see what needs to be met, we just do it. And sometimes it takes a while for the institutions to reflect that. And sometimes, they don't even get the story straight because it depends on who's telling it. A lot of this can be narrative as well. Which is why I'm so happy to platform you, because you get to tell the story as you see it. We have some more questions concerning your book, "Music Therapy and Early Childhood: A Developmental Approach". As I said, recently I'm kind of getting my chops together, trying to get back into how to orient myself to working with children again. Sam, if you wanna break down the clientele of Healing Waves-"

Sam: "Currently the primary clientele would be anywhere from the age of 2 or 3 all the way up to 30 years old. The majority is within the age range of 2-13, with the majority being younger than 10."

Kat: "A lot of cuties. So I wanted to ask you about a theme in chapter 14 of your book, the subheading that I am referring to is "play, music, and young children." You wrote that, "most developmental experts agree that children learn best through play, and in order to play best with the child the therapist will often need to be playful." So, intrinsically as trained music therapists we understand and honor this truth. However, Sam and I have found difficulty in translating the importance of play and its spontaneous nature to other adults. So, my question is, do you have any advice on how to bridge this gap and explain the immense role that play has in music therapy?"

Elizabeth: "So, I have to just mention that- this is a commercial. You know, I was talking about my connection up in Boston and Raising Harmony, which is a training platform. We provide a 10 week, 23 credit, CMTE course on that book. We've done it for years since the book came out, we went into the studio and recorded everything. We get music therapists from around the world who join. It's 10 weeks, it's a lot. The reason I'm thinking about it is that part of the course is providing the opportunity to really learn to talk about it and to advocate for it. The course is called "Sprouting Melodies", and we've got 14 pages of what we call "Sprouting Melodies Sayings" which are very short, little statements that you can offer to parents, to funders, to administrators in order to explain exactly what you're doing. Which takes me back to my first point, we just have to be so much better about communicating what we're doing. And we can no longer say, "well look!" or "well, he was happy!" We have moved way beyond that, but we need to practice and learn that. I think we need to draw on all of the resources we have including the neuroscience that we can bring in, which is so elegant, and the efficacy research that we can bring in that is so elegant. But we need to be able to talk about exactly what we're doing and why as we're doing this fun, playful stuff. We need to be able to turn to the parent and say, "did you see that in that moment the child was able to anticipate, integrate and respond to an external cue?" It's kind of this melding of science and art. And this is again where "sticking to our lane" and going, "no, if I talk like that I'm not humanistic enough." In fact, I think it's just the opposite, and we need to be tuning into all the resources we have. I have presented quite a bit on music cognition research and its relationship to early childhood music therapy. There's just brilliant stuff out there, stuff that's being done by our colleagues, that just so supports. If you want, I can give you one example that I use all the time. All these resources are there, but we just need to put them all together. There's a couple places that do great, great music neuroscience research, one of the ones that I'm gonna talk about now is University of Toronto. They have done a study that has been replicated a number of times on the development of what they identify and call empathy in very young children. It was an elegant study. So, they had two groups, like the same groups you're talking about with parents and children. They had children that came in with their significant grown up and did music based early childhood experiences. And then they had children that came in with their significant grown up and did reading stories and playing with toys. And then after the amount of weeks that they did this, they did a test situation. They had the parent, or the caregiver, and the child sitting in the room and then one of the scientists came in and pretended to accidently drop a toy on the floor and waited to see what happened. And in every replication a significant number of the children who had participated in music based early childhood experiences got up or moved toward retrieving the toy and handing it to the adult who had dropped it. Their interpretation of this, which I think is accurate, is that there's something about connecting to community and connecting to others through synchronized rhythmic and musical and movement play that develops the opportunity to understand others and to respond to others. So, it's stuff like that where knowing those pieces is so important. I try not to be a nerd, but sometimes I will say things like that to parents or to funders. "So let me tell you why I'm doing this." I think we just have to get much better at opening ourselves to the need to bring all of those resources together."

Sam: "Yeah. It's so hard sometimes just to explain why you're doing a specific thing you're doing, and then having to explain the little interactions that you see and if you mention that it's just a slight interaction, but it's big for the kid, and the parents like "but why is it small?" And having to go into it.

Elizabeth: "Because that's our job to go into it. Right? And that is part of our job to, again, not retreat into the background and go, "oh well", but to stand tall and know that we've got all of this out there. It then becomes an added responsibility of us being clear and being brave enough to present it."

Thank you for tuning into our revelatory and invigorating conversation with Elizabeth Schwartz. To all the music therapists out there, be encouraged and stand tall in your work. To all those who are working with music therapists, thank you for joining us in this wonderful practice and for showing us how to evolve.