Episode 08: A Music-Centered Perspective (with Kenneth Aigen, Phd, MT-BC)
In this episode, we will delve into the world of music therapy with Dr. Kenneth Aigen who takes us on a journey through his innovative approach to music therapy, known as music-centered music therapy. Join the conversation as he sheds light on how this unique method can benefit individuals in profound ways. He also shares his experiences working within the Nordoff-Robbins model of music therapy, offering insights into the transformative power of music in therapeutic settings. Through his personal anecdotes and clinical encounters, we will gain a deeper understanding of the healing potential of music and its ability to connect us on emotional, cognitive, and transcendental levels.
About Dr. Kenneth Aigen
Dr. Kenneth Aigen is a professor and director of the music therapy program in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University, and he is the Vice-Chair for Faculty Affairs for the Department of Music and Performing Arts Professions. He has lectured internationally and authored numerous publications on Nordoff-Robbins music therapy, qualitative research, and music-centered music therapy. He has three books in translation: Paths of Development in Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy (Japanese & Korean); Music-Centered Music Therapy (Japanese & Korean); The Study of Music Therapy: Current Issues and Concepts (Chinese & Korean). Dr. Aigen is president of the Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Foundation and a Trustee of Nordoff-Robbins International. He is also a past–president of the American Association for Music Therapy and was the scientific committee chairman for the Ninth World Congress of Music Therapy held in Washington, D.C. in 1999. Honors include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Music Therapy Association, the Research and Publications Award from the American Music Therapy Association, the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching from Temple University, and the Steinhardt Award for Excellence in Teaching from New York University. His current research is focused on the everyday uses of music by adults on the autism spectrum.
He maintains an active performing career playing keyboards in Stella Blue’s Band, a Grateful Dead tribute band in the New York metropolitan area, and in this capacity he has shared the stage with Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead and Melvin Seals of the Jerry Garcia Band.
Episode Resources
Book - Music-Centered Music Therapy
Book - Playing in the Band: A Qualitative Study of Popular Music Styles As Clinical Improvisation
Article - Music-Centered Dimensions of Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy
Website - Nordoff-Robbins
Transcript
This transcript was computer generated and might contain errors.
Marisa: Hey everyone and thanks for joining me again for another episode of Musical Mindspace. I really appreciate all of you taking the time to listen to these episodes. That’s my bird, Petie, making noises and singing in the background. Music is something that I’ve always been really passionate about and each episode that we’ve recorded so has just made me so excited for the opportunity to hear from different people and all these different perspectives and experiences of music.
In the last few episodes, we’ve focused on topics related to music psychotherapy from practices in Guided Imagery in Music to the psychology of music elements. In this episode we’re going to hear from a music-centered perspective of music therapy that I think also has important applications for both how we conceptualize music and the focus or intent of making music itself.
Today, we’re going to hear from Dr Kenneth Aigen, a board certified music therapist and a professor and director of music therapy at New York University. Dr. Aigen has lectured internationally and authored numerous publications on Nordoff-Robbins music therapy, qualitative research, and music-centered music therapy. He has three books in translation including “Paths of Development in Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy”, “Music-Centered Music Therapy”, and “The Study of Music Therapy: Current Issues and Concepts”. He’s received several awards for his work in music therapy including the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Research and Publications Award from the American Association of Music Therapy Outside of music therapy, he plays keyboards in a Grateful Dead tribute band.
All this being said, I’m just very grateful for the opportunity to speak with him about his perspective on music and some of his writings. His theory and the articles and books written by him influenced a lot of my practice as a music therapist and helped as I was forming my therapeutic identity along the way.
So, this is what’s on our mindspace today, this is Episode 8: A Music-Centered Perspective.
Marisa: All right, welcome back to another episode of musical mind space. As you may have heard in the intro today, we are going to focus on different perspectives of music again in a context of music therapy, but still a niche perspective within even music therapy itself. So I'm very excited to introduce Dr. Ken Aigen today. Thank you so much for being here.
Kenneth Aigen: Very glad to be able to join you and your listeners today.
Marisa: Thanks so we know to get started. I know I mentioned a little bit in the intro, but would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself and your clinical background as a music therapist?
Kenneth Aigen: Sure, well I won't go back too far, but I'll go back to my own college days because my background is a little bit atypical for music therapists. And I think it influenced the way my practice and theory preferences developed. Undergrad school, I was a philosophy and psychology double major. Musically, I'm a self-taught pop and rock musician. Keyboard’s my main instrument and I usually just played for fun when I was much younger and then I graduated with an undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin, and I did what most people with an undergrad psycho and philosophy degree do, I joined to country rock band because there wasn’t much else you could do with that and this was the late 1970s so country rock was really big. Although I'm in New Yorker, I was going to school in Wisconsin and Madison really liked it out there and spent two years playing country rock music in frat houses and bars and country music around the country and American Legion halls and all those kinds of things and did that for about two years and the band broke up.
And I was 24 at that time and I wasn't really sure what to do with my life because I thought I would go into academia in philosophy or psychology and then I kind of got bored with that at the end of my academic career. Then I played music for two years and I said I don't know there's something that I'm better at than this because neither psychology alone nor performing alone was satisfying to me. So I moved back home with my parents at age 24, which wasn't so easy. I had no money because the band sold our van and equipment. I had a little bit of cash for a few months and then of course I needed to go out and find work.
So I saw an ad in the newspaper for a pianist wanted. It was at a school for emotionally disturbed kids. They had a theater arts group and the theater group at the school needed an accompanist because they didn't schools and stuff. So I went and auditioned and interviewed for that job and the audition basically consisted of the director had me sit and work with some of the kids musically.
Marisa: Wow.
Kenneth Aigen: So after that interview was conducted he said well listen. we're really looking for somebody older who's going to stick around for a long time. But we like the way you worked with the kids. and we have this job opening here for teachers aid and it wasn't the job I had come for but it was when I was being offered. So, of course I grabbed it.
Marisa: Yeah. Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: And so now it was a teacher's assistant at a school for emotionally disturbed kids in New York City and I came back to the office to do some paperwork one day and it was another woman there and she was doing some paperwork and we just started chatting and it turned out she was the woman who was leaving the keyboard job that I had just applied for. We just started talking and she mentioned, well I said, “Yeah it sounds like a great job. Why are you leaving?”. And said “Well, I'm going to study this thing called music therapy at New York University”. And when was this the fall winter of 1980 and I was like music therapy. Never heard of that. Boy, I'm a musician. I love music. I was a Psychology major. I love working with people. I love kids. Maybe that's what I’m going to look into and she was very encouraging so I worked there for a few months but went to school at NYU beginning in September 1981. And this was pre-internet days. So it was very hard to find out about small professions like that it…
Marisa: Yeah, and…
Kenneth Aigen: if you didn't know.
Marisa: it was just getting started around that time. So we're still being established from what I understand.
Kenneth Aigen: Yeah, I mean listen, the first college program music therapy started in 1945, but the program at NYU started around 1970. So it was about 10 years old when I went there and I didn't really know anything about the NYU approach or what type of theories or clinical approaches were taught at school. It was just I lived in New York. And this was the program in New York. So, I went there. And I got my Master's Degree and the program there which is true to today, here we are 42 years later, but it's a very humanistic approach. It's very much music based. It's very much reliant on creative and improvisational approaches and it really is focused on psychotherapeutic music therapy, which I can talk more about as we get along but we kept those elements now 42 years later, but my approach to music therapy really was set there. I will say I was lucky in that I accidentally came to a program really suited my own preferences and values into valuing creativity, improvisation, the importance of the therapeutic relationship, the idea of empowering clients, the idea of not being the expert are the therapist but someone who collaborates with their client to determine what to do.
All of those ideas were latent in my early training. Clinically, my first job was at a New York City public school. I worked for two years with autistic kids and what we called emotionally handicapped or Ed emotionally disturbed kids. Did that for two years and then I had a great opportunity. I went and worked for five years with another music therapy pioneer called Florence Tyson who created a place called The Creative Arts Rehabilitation Center, which was an outpatient facility for people with psychiatric issues that only offered music, art, dance, drama and poetry therapy. There were no other kinds of therapy offered. So it was really heaven for a creative arts therapist.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: We could work with individuals. We could do long-term work, which I learned so much doing that. I did that for five years. Then I got a research grant and I went and lived in Denmark for a year…
Marisa: Oh wow.
Kenneth Aigen: Well, there were, I had two reasons for going there. I got a research grant which allowed me to complete my doctoral dissertation, but my partner who I subsequently married was Danish and this enabled us to be together spending that year in Denmark.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: And so I did that for a year, not doing any clinical work. Then I returned to the states after a year and a half, went back to that clinic for one year, and then in 1991, I got a job as the research director at the Nordoff-Robbins Center for music therapy at New York University.
Marisa: Okay.
Kenneth Aigen: And because I just gotten my doctoral degree. I wanted a job that would allow me to do research. However, although I was a creative music therapist who used improvisational a lot, I had not taken the Nordoff-Robbins music therapy training. So when I got this research director's job, I was no longer doing any clinical work, which I missed. We all get into the field because we love doing the work itself. And then sometimes as we move along and our careers advance, we get further away from the actual thing that we love to do.
Marisa: Yeah, yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: But what happened there was really interesting. About three years into working there Clive Robbins was working with Alan Turi, in Nordoff-Robbins work people work in teams. And Clive said, “We have this client Lloyd and I think he needs a co-therapist who plays the guitar and Ken would you like to come in and assist Allen in those therapy sessions?” So I jumped at the chance. I hadn't done any clinical work in three years and…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: that began a long course of therapy with this man Lloyd. Alan and I worked with him at least 10 or 12 years.And it was such a significant course of therapy that I wrote a book about it called Playing in the Band and it details how we used popular music idioms such as rock, blues, and jazz with clinical intention and…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: I'm sure you'll want to ask me about that and what that does and we'll get into that in a moment just to complete my career overview.
Marisa: Sure.
Kenneth Aigen: So I took that Nordoff-Robbins training about four or five years into my tenure there. And so I was able to work clinically where most of the work was with Autistic kids, emotionally disabled kids, a few, let's see an adults with stroke, but most of the work was with people with relatively more severe impairments, mostly children at that point. So just to sum up my clinical background, started out with the kids, five years with adults with psychiatric issues then working with all kinds of kids with various types of delays.
Marisa: And you're still at NYU, is that correct?
Kenneth Aigen: Yeah, I've had a little bit a of a studious career path. I was at NYU from 91 to 2006. And then I had left NYU for seven years. I went to Temple University to work with Ken Bruscia who I consider a real mentor. I mean, I was age 50 and although I had been teaching a lot, I never really had somebody who taught me how to teach and…
Marisa: yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: and Ken was a great teaching mentor. At that point in my career, just speaking candidly, he was one of the very few people I felt they could still learn from so I went to Temple for seven years. I commuted from New York. It was a 110 miles each way and…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: it's not like driving out in Texas or Arizona where you can do 110 miles in an hour and not worry about, traffic a hundred miles in the Northeast can be two hours or…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: it could be, three and a half depending on traffic.
Marisa: Oh yeah. I've got to say I didn't realize you were at Temple. I'm at Temple right now. I'm doing some graduate studies there and I've taken a train ride from there to New York. And I've seen that yeah I know what you mean.
Kenneth Aigen: All right, I drove I never took the train because of where I lived. But I did that for seven years and then in 2013, I had the opportunity to come back to NYU where I've been for the last 11 years now.
Marisa: That's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. It’s just so interesting. I love hearing how we're all on our own journeys in a lot of ways in music therapy and music personally, and, it's always so interesting to hear everybody's story of how they come into music therapy and how they find music therapy and then find their own spot, even, within music therapy. There's just so many approaches and so many different ways to practice now and yours is one (music-centered) which we’ll kind of move into now, but it's one that I personally really resonate with. When I read things that you've written, it's always something that I really appreciate and so I'm really excited to hear more about this perspective too. Would you mind hearing a little bit about what is music-centered music therapy now that we're kind of getting into it.
Kenneth Aigen: Sure, you know, one of my core beliefs is that our relationship to…we’re all music therapists because of experiences we had as musicians and as listeners before we ever heard of music therapy.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: So what did that means to me is that our non-clinical musical selves musician-selves are essential tools to use as music therapists and the experiences we've had as people who played music and listen to music and non-clinical settings has a great deal of relevance for what music therapy is all about and why it works. So now a little bit theoretical and just talk about what I think are the core ideas of what music centered music therapy are. So if we look at, sort of the conventional wisdom in the field and the traditional definitions that most people are taught is that music therapy is the use of music for non-musical clinical goals.
Marisa: Mmhm..
Kenneth Aigen: At first glance that seems like a reasonable assertion. Because if you're working on a musical goal, that must be you're doing music education or music performance or music education. So the people that decided to define music therapy as the use of music to achieve non-musical, clinical goals were probably thinking, well need a way to distinguish what we do as music therapist what other musicians do
So then the typical goals of music therapy would be, depending on who you work with. If you work with someone who had a stroke and had speech impairment, maybe it's recovering speech or help someone with motor rehabilitation who has a paralyzed limb or perhaps working with someone with emotional challenges to increase self-esteem or just if you think of that we would.. the non-clinical goals are the goals of speech therapists, physical therapists, psychotherapists. Right, those on musical clinical goals But there's a real problem here. And the problem is this…if music is merely a tool to a non-musical, clinical goal in a way, the specific characteristics of the music the musical experience is irrelevant.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: In other words, we have to claim that we can achieve therapy goals better than speech therapists. We can achieve motor goals better than physical therapists. We can achieve psychotherapy goals better than psychotherapists because our music is just a tool to a non-musical end and hey, we're rendering the actual musical experience the client has as unimportant and unessential to the process and in a way, I don't think it's true. But also, I think it's sort of dangerous for the long term survival of music therapy as a profession if we have to say we're doing all of those things better.
Marisa: Yeah. Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: So basically, what music centered music therapy says, is that the musical experience the client has is the goal of the therapy. And that our goal as music therapists, but we look at music as an essential health resource. And we think is a human right to music. If music is a health resource, there's a human right to music just as there's a human right for freedom and food and shelter and safety. And we have an ethical obligation to provide this health resource to our clients through our work as music therapists. And so that is what orients us as music therapists. Here's the analogy.
Then people well say yeah, but we see our clients self-esteem improve and we see their motor functioning and we see their speech improve. Why can't we say that's the goal and purpose of our work? And here's the analogy I like to use. I like to go hiking in the mountains. Now hiking in the mountains here has a lot of health benefits.. a lot. My heart rate, muscle improvement, cardiovascular, respiratory, all of these secondary benefits, but those aren't the reasons I go hiking in the mountains. If that was my reasons, I'd sit in my basement on my elliptical machine and not deal with packing u, right bugs, and the rain, and the cold and the sweat…
Marisa: Yeah, yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: And all those benefits that I achieve from hiking are the secondary benefits there. They are not the reason I go hiking. I go hiking for the intrinsic value of what I experience on the hike and so in music-centered music therapy approach, the music to me the exact analogy, it's like hiking in the mountains. When people are engaged with music with their full being, we see motor functioning, verbal skills improved, self-esteem, all of these things occurring, but they’re the secondary benefits of the primary focus again being how the person feels about him, theirselves, how they relate to other peopl,e and how they think about the world while engaged in music.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: And last thing I'll say here and then I'm sure you have some questions is that what I would say is that…people say, aren't you worried about the generalization of what you do? And what I say is this when I go hiking and I have all these wonderful aesthetic feelings and connections with nature, experiences of beauty, that changes who I am as a human being. Right now, I don't have to hike every single day to feel it. The experiences I have while hiking change who I am and I think the same is true for involvement with music…that those experiences change the core of people's beings so that they're better positioned to engage with the world, their sense of self, their sense of the world as a benevolent place to be. So let me pause there a little bit and…
Marisa: Yeah. Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: just it amplify or explain any more of those things.
Marisa: No, I have to say that analogy just really does put it together and I recently went to the Redwoods. I was lucky enough to go to the Redwood National Park and I came back a different person and it's the same thing. Nothing else could've given me quite that experience. It's almost everything all together and I feel that way with music too because it's so multi-sensory. There's so much going on that I don't think there's anything for me that quite puts me in a place as when I'm making music with other people because there's just so much going on. There's so many levels to the experience and for me at least as a music therapist and just in my own engagement with music that's what I love about it.That's what brought it and I tell my students that too is that's why we came to music in the first place. That's kind of what brought us to music therapy is that we love music. It gave us connection. It gives us purpose. It gives us a way to express ourselves. It gives us meaning and it's so much more than just maybe Gabby said in a quote, the notes on a page or just that the mere audio of it itself. There's so much more to it than that and…
Kenneth Aigen: But yeah.
Marisa: I appreciate that so much about your music- centered perspectives is that it kind of encompasses that and I know I think it was in your book about music centered music therapy that you said it almost feels redundant to say music-centered music therapy, but it's not because even in music therapy, I think sometimes the emphasis isn't always just on the music itself and whether maybe that's because we have to justify to the government what we do and we have to get reimbursement and we have to count data. We have to do all these things to give access to music therapy. And sometimes that does kind of shift the focus, I think just a little bit to those secondary things that you mentioned.
Kenneth Aigen: Yeah, and I talk about this to my students every year and they wonder “Well, I'm in the site and can I just tell the doctors, well we're here just to make music?” and they use the word just…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: And I say, well, first of all let's take this apart a little bit.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: I'm telling you, if you consider a music therapy session. And you want to say what's going on here, really? That question has multiple answers if you ask the client, if you ask the therapist, if you ask a family member of the client observing, if you ask the aid, if you ask the psychologist, it's like you've got this thing this session and all these different perspectives…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen:. so what I tell my students is, we've learned to speak the language of these non-musical goals. And that's what's necessary to survive in the world so what you should make sure you do is don't let the necessity of having to explain the work non-musically make you forget that what's really happening is something else and…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: something deeper and something beyond that. Well, then they say “well, then you're not being honest”. You're sort of…and I say no, let's look at it this way. There are multiple realities going on here. Who's to say that one of the perspectives is more real than any other so when we learn the languages, we learn to inhabit the perspectives of parents, family members, medical doctors, psychologists so that we can function in all those domains.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: Our ethical obligation is to get the music to our clients. So mastering the other languages and ways of thinking isn't dishonest because it's just saying, there are multiple intersecting realities. I'm going to learn to inhabit as many of them as possible in order to get my clients the services they need but I'm not going to let the fact that I have to explain it a certain way affect what I do in this session because I’ll tell you, if someone's focused on “Well, I'm gonna make you relate better to me” or “I'm gonna help your arm move greater”, the person feels like they're being controlled and manipulated to do something. To me, that paradox is, you get better outcomes in these secondary areas when you don't focus on them.
Marisa: Yeah. Yup.
Kenneth Aigen: I mean, if I'm focusing on just exercising I want to quit after half an hour. If I’m experiencing the grandeur of the Redwoods or the mountains or the canyons, I'm gonna much better benefits and I think the same is true for music. When a client is deeply involved in the aesthetic rewards of the experience, you're actually seeing much greater motor functioning, cognitive functioning and expressive functioning and I talk about this a lot in that book Playing in the Band. I mentioned that I wrote about our Alan Turry and my’s work with that client Lloyd because Lloyd was a client with extreme developmental delays, nonverbal, impaired motor coordination, but he loved groove music. He loved rock and jazz and what we found was that if we could absorb him, if we can help him become absorbed in the music with us, say he was playing the drum set along with us, whereas outside of music he wouldn't focus on anything more than 10 seconds at a time. If we can involve them in playing the drums, say, to a rock and roll beat so he's cognitively focused. He stayed as the cognitive goal is addressed, motor functioning is addressedbecause he's controlling his limbs to play in a steady tempo. Social goals exist. He was very intimidated from relating to others but if he’d sit with us improvises for six or seven minutes, he's related socially. So there's the social goal, the motor goal, the cognitive goal, and also he was very volatile emotionally. He would sit but again, if the groove held him down he could contain his emotions. So you could see the achievement of very profound goals on all four levels. We're not thinking of those goals. We're thinking we're holding Lloyd in the musical experience and all those benefits accrue because we're not focusing on them intentionally and I know it sounds paradoxical, but I have to say in my 40 years as a music therapist that it's one of my core beliefs because I’ve just seen it over and over.
Marisa: Yeah no, that's just so wonderfully said and it's true because I think when our focus is on the music, it's almost like everything else is just outside of that and the music just holds the space for this experiences in a way that like I said, nothing else really can at that level because I think it relates to us in so many ways. For those of you listening that are music educators, as music therapists we're thinking about music in terms of cognitive health and social health and physical health like he mentioned, and it's very interesting to see how all of those come together. Like you said, even when we're not necessarily coming in with the intention of this is what we're gonna do and we're gonna sit and we're gonna raise our arms, up and down and really putting the emphasis on that. It kind of comes as we just experience music and I think there's something really beautiful about going into music spaces with that intention and with that belief and what that value. It changes almost the foundation, I think, of how we even see our client and how we see the music experience and how we see the therapeutic relationship. Everything kind of shifts. And for me, I see it in my clients when I talk to them this way or when I engage them this way. I just see so much meaning and purpose and maybe that's a little existential too. But I think that that's where the beauty comes from is finding meaning in the experience instead of yes, we did this and it's more than just a checkbox, then I met this goal. I did this. Music did that and the data and just saying I had a meaningful experience that really kind of transcended the goal itself or the intention itself.
Kenneth Aigen: Right. Well listen, as musicians, as music therapists, we've created a life around music. Clearly it has given us a sense of purpose and meaning so why shouldn't it offer that to clients?
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: Why should we be engaging with them on that level and dealing with those questions of meaning and purpose because I think ultimately that's what we do. I mean again, I work with my students and I tell them you have to understand you may have 20 sessions in this week and you just move from one to the next and becomes just your job, but for your client, that 30, or 45, or 60 minutes very often is the most important 3,0 45, or 60 minutes of their week.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: That’s when they come alive. Imagine if your only contact with music, with live music making, was mediated through your therapy session, how much that hour would mean to you and…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: I try to get people to realize, to adopt the client’s perspective in that. And listen, many of the clients we work with don't have a concept of therapy. All right again going back to this client, Lloyd, I remember Lloyd's mom saying, “Lloyd doesn't think this is therapy. He thinks you're his music buddies and it’s just music time” and that statement really stayed with me because I've heard colleagues over the years say, you know, we use the music as an inducement for the therapy. What's happening is the therapy and it was almost like the music's just like the sugar that helps the medicine go down.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: And I started realizing and thinking about all these music therapists thinking well this client thinks it's just music time. They don't realize it's actually therapy and I'm picturing the clients thinking, “Hey, they think they're doing therapy with me, but I'm just here for the music”. It's almost like why should the therapist’s or psychologist’s or medical doctor’s perspective take precedence over that of the client. So for me the whole music-centered framework for me was driven by the need to develop an approach in music therapy that took the client's perspective as primary. They are the primary stakeholders of what's going on here and to the extent possible can we formulate a theoretical framework that doesn't require non-musical thinking and non-musical goals as its basic rationale. If the client’s there for the music, we need to have a model that takes that seriously.
Now, of course a lot of people come to therapy for non-musical goals, relationship problems, some with inaudible
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: And so perhaps music centered thinking isn't necessarily appropriate. So it's not as if it's appropriate for every context and for every client. All I try to say is we just need a framework for the clients and context where it's appropriate and needed.
Marisa: Yeah and that kind of I think brings us to some of the foundations and there's an article that you wrote in 2014 about foundations and principles in music centered perspectives and also in Nordoff-Robbins that I think are really helpful and kind of understanding this also on another level and also kind of with a little more context that you just provided and I'd like to talk a little bit about those too if that's all right. There's a few that you mentioned that I think kind of go along with that as well. And I think we've kind of touched on some of them already like music as a medium of experience, but there's some two that I think are very interesting and such a different way…if you are listening and you just love music, a different way of thinking about music which is what our podcast is here for right? We're trying to expand how we think about music and how we understand and experience music and one that I’d really like to touch on too is the idea of music development as self-development and that parallel process. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Kenneth Aigen: Yeah,sure. I think some of this comes from the Nordoff-Robbins practice and theory because when Paul Nordoff and Clive Robbins first started their work and started writing about it in the early 1960s, I think first of all, right, I just have to say imagine how radical that idea was in 1960.
Marisa: Yeah. Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: We're going to do this thing called music therapy, and we're going to work with very impaired children. None of them are trained musicians, but we're going to activate their musicality. We're not playing music for them to change them. We're looking at them as co-musicians. We're playing music together with them and it has been such a radical idea at the time. And I think their approach was motivated by a couple of parallel realizations, one that they would put children on a drum and symbol and other percussion instruments that were expressively rewarding but didn't take a lot of training to play and get a pleasing sound out of and they saw the client’s limitations in the music. So if someone had an overly rigid, obsessive ,cognitive style, that might manifest as an inability to play different tempe or play at different dynamic levels to get louder and softer, to play faster and slower, and then you say “Well, why is it important? Why is it important to have tempo flexibility or dynamic range?” Because if you don't, the range of musical emotional experience you can have is quite limited. If you only play two one Dynamic level.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: So the idea was that we see the person's limitations in the music, but we also see the growth so clinical musicianship was focused upon expanding the client's expressive repertoire. Right…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: If they can only play one tempo, let's see if we can work on accelerando and ritardando or crescendo and diminuendo. Let's just improvise and see if we can work in a way where the client can accompany us or perhaps if the client's musicality is so chaotic and disorganized reflecting the chaotic inner life, let's see if we can bring organization by having them play in a steady tempo. So if a person is overly closed and rigid, we want to expand and give freedom to the playing. If the playing is overly freedom or all freedom without any structure, then we want to work towards bringing structure. So the work would be oriented to one or the other but the idea is…say a person again a child who has tempo inflexibility or narrow dynamic range, when we start helping them become more comfortable with tempo flexibility and dynamic range, we’re enlarging their capacity for emotional experience. We're also connecting their motor function to their cognitive skills and their emotional skills. So when we say musical development as self-development it’s because we don't see musicianship as a rote behavior.
Marisa: Mmm.
Kenneth Aigen: That's why I've always been very against any sort of behavioral approach in music therapy…because it doesn't or I mean for any therapy for that matter, but especially in music therapy because we look at music musicing, which is a word we use, as we looked at we look at a person's musicality as a form of intelligent action. It's not a rote behavior.It's an intelligence that's manifested, not in verbalized knowledge but in interactive skill and so that's again to get back to your question. That's why we see musical development as self-development because we see a person's integration of cognitive, emotional, social, and motor skills taking place within the music.
Marisa: Yeah, yeah, and even personally just kind of looking at my own experience with music, I think music has given me so much and we kind of said that earlier but you learn a lot about yourself in the music…
Kenneth Aigen: That’s right.
Marisa: You learn about how you express yourself, how you take things in, what matters to you, what your values are. There's so much of the music that's connected to we are and even just as we grow up, as we get older, as we change and go through all these life experiences, we develop too and we grow and we expand and there's so much to be said in the music about that, as well. I really appreciate you sharing that yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: Yeah, and that can only happen that again, I think we should talk a little bit about clinical musicianship. I think that's important topics here and…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: I think one of the problems or limitations in our field is people who are trained, well, I'm going to use this song or I’m gonna play this song with this client and not consider, well, how am I going to play it? What dynamic range? What key? What instrument will I play it on? In the Nordoff-Robbins work, for example, the idea is that we're creating through the music what I call a sound portrait - a portrait of that person's inner life in sound so that the person feels seen, heard, reflected so I think the client can only have the kind of experience in music that you described, learning about oneself if the source of the music is that person…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: And that's what we're to do in a creative music therapy approach is to create a portrait in sound of that person's inner life and it's trial and error because we don't…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: what works so you have to be able to try different things. That's why our training involves mastering as many possible styles, scales and idioms of music because you never know what music a person will respond to. Now just getting back to Lloyd one more time. I think one thing that's really important in terms of clinical musicianship is learning to use the elements of music with clinical intent. What kind of mood is a whole tone create? Or a pentatonic? Or an augmented scale? What kind of mood is created there? And when and why would I want to use that music clinically?
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: I have to say just a brief anecdote. I remember once I was visited at the Nordoff-Robbins Center by a medical doctor who had come from Vanderbilt Hospital. They were thinking of establishing a music therapy program with Vanderbilt University at their University Hospital and this guy was going around the country visiting different music therapy settings. And then I talked to him a little bit about Nordoff-Robbins work and talked about when we would want to use a whole tone music that had no diatonic, harmonic impetus or when we want to use diatonic music with the strong feel of the cadence and I said, you know, if we're working with someone that we're trying to encourage motor activity will avoid a strong cadence because the cadence provides a sense of closure and stopping. You pause after a cadence So that's the last thing we want to do.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: However, if we're working on someone who has a problem containing impulses, we might use that and he said, “You know, you're the first person I've talked to that actually has explaining to me how and why the different musical choices you make relate to the specific clinical focus. So use that as an anecdote that even medical doctors who we think might not be so open to music centered thinking, it actually corresponds to their training, right? They look at medications and consider how the biochemical property of a medicine reacts with the human body and by describing our work with that musical specificity, I was able to access the way he thinks medically in a way to be able to connect the specifics to the outcome. And so something as music therapists we have to focus on more.
Marisa: Absolutely. I agree and for me personally, I think the reason why I resonate with a lot of the things that you're saying is I fundamentally believe we're creative beings. We just have this need to create and to express ourselves and music just lends itself to that so well, and so I always tell my students too and or even in my clinical work just bring it back to the music. What are we doing musically that really connects with that person or…
Kenneth Aigen: Mmm.
Marisa: If we're going to talk about all these goals, how are we doing that musically? What does the music have to offer because it's our biggest resource as music therapists. It is and I think, like you said earlier, sometimes we try to explain things in such a different way. We try to focus things on a different way in a different level, but the music will do it if we really sit and think about it like you said with those cadences. If we really just put a lot of intention into our clinical work, the music will do it.
Kenneth Aigen: yeah, and…
Marisa: It really will.
Kenneth Aigen: The key word there was creative. Nordoff- Robbins, the third book, their biggest book was called Creative Music Therapy and that creativity is not just on the therapist’s part which was necessary to do that work because you have to create themes and motifs and melodies that speak to a client because it reflects the client's inner being but what we're trying to do is activate the client’s creative capacities because we feel that's where the capacity for growth and transformation lies. It’s the activation of the client's creativity and I've always felt our obligation as music therapists is to provide opportunities to activate our clients creativity.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: Because that's where then we're activating their capacity for growth and development.
Marisa: And you mentioned something earlier too that I want to touch on really quick. And for those that are not familiar with the term musicing. Can you explain that a little bit more for them?
Kenneth Aigen: Yeah sure, I think it's funny because with other art forms, dancing, acting, there's always a verb that but music, we've always had…music’s this external thing and actually there's a music educator of philosophy of music education, David Elliott, from whom we take that term musicing and what it suggests is that, again I didn’t use the term but that music is a form of intelligent human action and embodied in our actions is intelligence, and this is a really important concept because if we make the judgment that a client is making music with us if they are musicing, even if they're quite impaired and nonverbal, we are making the judgment that there's consciousness and intentionality present in that client and we use term musicing because it allows us to look at our clients' musicality in a diagnostic sense and that again music. There's just this tendency to look at music as behavior rather than music as intelligence in action. And so it's like an embodied intelligence.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: That's how we think about music and that's why we use the term musicing because we look at music as something people do not something we know. So a client may not be able to tell you, “Oh you just played a cadence so I'm going to stop”, but a client that feels the resolution of a cadence is exhibiting musical intelligence, right? They feel the intent.
Marisa: Mm-hmm
Kenneth Aigen: So that intelligence isn't reliant on being able to state it. It's reliant on being able to feel what the forces of music and…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: be able to react to them?
Marisa: Yeah, it almost feels like music is in our whole being and I have music in my whole being and you have music in your whole being and we're interacting on that deeper level together musically.
So there's a couple more that you mentioned in your article that I want to touch on briefly because I know I think with some of these you've touched on them already so wonderfully in our conversation, but there's a couple that I want to point out and the musical child is one that I definitely want to talk about and music as identity is, I think, a big one for our listeners to hear.
Kenneth Aigen: Well, let me go in reverse order there a little bit.This music as identity. So I think this is one of those things that connects music therapy to non-clinical experiences and uses of music. I think music is a vehicle for identity creation for everyone. Think about how much of who we are is tied up in our chosen music, the music that reflects our feelings, our emotions, our values. Think about the social groups that we connect with music and…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: I'm not even talking about music therapy at all. It's just that music as the soundtrack of our lives is an essential vehicle for figuring out who we are, what we think, what we feel, what we believe, and what people we want to connect with. And I think that's true.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: Look at how important music is in all religious communities. Look how important it is for adolescents. I recently did a research project where I interviewed 29 autistic adults, obviously, they were verbal, about their relationship to music and large number of them said that, I know that I acted and behaved and thought quite differently from the people around me, but my music culture and whether that was punk or emo or heavy metal or Grateful Dead and jam band They said in my music subculture, I was totally accepted.
Kenneth Aigen: And it was so interesting to me that it was the one place they weren't bullied or made to feel strange or bizarre. They could act every way felt natural to them. And so again, their music culture was an important part of their musical identity. So I think that in music therapy, we provide experiences that help people.. I want to figure out who they are, but it's not that there's a latent being that they're discovering. They're actually there. We create ourselves, we create who we are through our musical experiences. So I think the same thing happens in music therapy. We're just providing access to music for people who can't manage it on their own and this kind of actually the other point I was making before about students who say we just making music and what I say is, music has these universal uses such as an identity creation is one of them and sometimes what we do is music therapists is just provide access to those tools for people who don't have the economic, or sociocultural, or cognitive or intellectual capacity to do it for themselves. And that's why I think what it does is it connects to what happens in music outside of therapy and rather than saying to disabled folks, hey, everybody else gets music, but you get this thing called music therapy because you're disabled. To the extent that we can show that what happens in music therapy is the same as what happens outside, we’re dissolving that artificial boundary between people with abilities and people without disabilities. So, I think that that's one of the core and important ideas here.
Marisa: Yeah, it's such a big connection, music. It connects everybody. Yeah, it's unifier in a lot of ways.
Kenneth Aigen: Yeah so that was that question about music identity and I think asked about music child.
Marisa: I did. Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: I'll say one thing about that maybe a little more than one because it’s one of those notions that’s recently been evolving and I think what again another way of thinking of a great deal of sympathy and interesting and agreement with the idea about neurodiversity, especially as it relates to Autism but other areas of challenge and disability as well. So I think the original idea was that there was something called the music child and…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: it was core of every disabled person and it represented a healthy, whole human being but this music child was surrounded by a disability that imposed limitations on person either cognitively or emotionally or socially and what music did was it kind of went into the person, bypassed the defenses put up by the area of disability and access that healthy core inside.
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: And that was the music child. This constellation of musical sensitivities that if accessed, could be used for self-actualization. And I should say too that in the Nordoff-Robbins work, it is at its most fundamental focused on self-actualizing, helping our clients become the most full human beings that they can become within whatever limitations are imposed by their challenges or disabilities. And I …
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: when people have such profound needs, they may need help getting dressed, may need help feeding themselves. We forget that they're still human beings with the same needs for transcendence and beauty and connection and spiritual awareness. We just don’t get it because some of their needs are so basic but I think that's what we do in music therapy is we can focus on those concrete motor and cognitive goals, but we're also helping provide aesthetic, spiritual, communal, transcendent experiences to people. So again back to the music child, there was a sense that there was a healthy being within every disabled person that music helped to access and I think we're moving past that in one sense. I think particularly as related to autism. I think the idea was there's a healthy person that exists within the boundaries of the autistic person that there was an autistic shell and then a healthy person. I think now we look at that as a projection. That rather than seeing autism as its own neurodiverse profile, which we do now, back then it was seen as a real serious limitation or illness that had to be cured and so the difference in the way we look, we still consider the music child, but we don't see it as well, that's the healthy part inside the autistic person. We see it as just a constellation of skills that help us self actualize and it doesn’t make say the non-autistic person, non autistic to actualize them. It just makes them be the most full autistic person they can be…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: So I think we’re still retaining the construct, but we're just thinking about it and a little different way that reflects contemporary sensibilities in that area.
Marisa: It's the beauty of the neurodiversity and just the diverseness and in the human experience. Yeah. Yeah,…
Kenneth Aigen: Yes.
Marisa: Well, thank you so much for sharing all this, I have one last quick question for you. And it's something I like to ask everybody at the end is just how has this perspective because we've talked about so many wonderful things and so much in the music and our personal lives, but I'm curious to know to just how is the shaped maybe your own relationship to music and your own connection to music outside, of the field…
Kenneth Aigen: Yeah It's funny because I think that I became a music therapist because of a lot of experiences I had and I mentioned in my bio, I played a grateful attribute band and I think what I witnessed in the 1970s at Grateful Dead concerts was their music, their concerts would include very conventional pop songs and then 15 minute feedback improvisations that explored full boundaries of human sound and human experience and…
Marisa: yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: I experienced transcendence, healing and I witnessed that amongst audience members. So I say I think for me I became a music therapist…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: because I saw what music could do at extreme dimension and aspects of human experience and so becoming a music therapist allowed me to have a medium in which to enact what I felt was the real, full, power of music, so my non-clinical musical experiences determined what kind of music therapist I was. Now you're asking me but having worked with music as a music therapist, how did that then come back and…
Marisa: Yeah.
Kenneth Aigen: affect my musical experience? Ummm, wow. Well, I have to say it probably opened my mind to forms of music that I probably may have dismissed before and I'll give you one example before we close. I think you'll appreciate it.
Marisa: Sure.
Kenneth Aigen: In the early earlier mid 1980s, I was working with a young boy, a Hispanic client, early adolescence 12 or 13. And it seemed to be someone who perhaps was gay, but didn't realize it. And he idolized Madonna. And so we did a lot of Madonna songs in our sessions and then I took him to, it was again mid 80s a concert movie of hers came out. I think trying to remember maybe it was Truth or Dare. I can't remember the name of the movie and I worked with him for a few years. And then, after, we terminated, we moved on. And, you know, I’m a Deadhead and listening to psychedelic music and jazz and stuff. And I found, believe it or not, I missed that Madonna music and I went out and bought a Madonna album True Blue, actually listened to it outside of the clinic. So that probably happened that seeing how important this music was to him and to his identity creation helped me to listen to it. It wasn't part of my identity creation, but I appreciated it because the way that he related to it and I think as a music therapist, it opened me to music that I might have been in an ignorant way, very dismissive of and such as a Madonna that didn't so I think it’s really positive impact in that way.
Marisa: Yeah. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. Yeah, and that's true. I've had similar experiences and…
Kenneth Aigen: Oh, really?
Marisa: that way. Yeah, it opens you up to a lot of new worlds and I'm just new ways of thinking and I'm new ways to use music and I just feel for me too as a music therapist, I'm just constantly growing in that way. There's always something to learn just like this podcast too and our conversation. There's always another way to think about it.
So I definitely appreciate your time and being here today and be willing to have this conversation with us for me and for Gabby here with us and also for our listeners, I will say real quick to you for those of you listening, if you're interested in any of the things that have come up. We've mentioned some books. We’ve mentioned some journal articles. We do have a link in our bio, if you're on Spotify or if you are on our social medias and our website rgvmusictherapy.com. We do have a Blog where it'll have copies of the transcripts and they'll be links to anything that we've mentioned here in this article. If you're interested about reading more about music-centered thinking and more about music therapy, it'll all be there. Nordoff-Robbins, everything that we touched on today will be linked so that you can maybe buy a copy of the book or check out some of those articles and readings.
They'll also be interactive polls that we do. So feel free to engage with us in that way. And then lastly there's an option to send us a voice memo. So if you have any thoughts or you'd like clarification or would just like to share any experiences with us as you listen, feel free to send us a voicemail when we'd be happy to answer and respond in the best way that we can.
So Dr. Aigen, thank you so much for being here and again for sharing your thoughts with us. We appreciate it so much.
Kenneth Aigen: Thanks to you and Gabby, Marisa, and thanks to your audience. I always say if people listen to what I have to say, that's a real gift that I'm being given. And so I just want to express gratitude to you for this opportunity to talk for a while and to promote the ideas and values that I think are essential in our field because I think that are the ones that our clients would be advocating for if they had the opportunity.
Marisa: Yeah, I agree. Thank you again and until next time we'll see you all soon. Thanks.
Kenneth Aigen: Okay. Bye.
