Snow and Music Therapy Weekend

Today it has been snowing!  It is so great when it does this in Texas because we never get to experience it that much.  I have to say, I am okay with not having it all the time.  Texas has the weirdest weather of any state.  This weekend, I didn't have to wear a jacket on Friday.  Today it was snowing.  Can anybody explain this?  I'm ready for the spring weather to come back because it is getting close to my birthday!  I am really lucky because my birthday is over my spring break.  The funny thing is that my mom told me I am having a surprise party....haha.  It will be such a huge surprise.

So this past weekend we had music therapy weekend at the university.  It was a VERY long weekend.  First on Friday, I had to go to a session at the hospital.  I worked with clients for about an hour and then came home for about 30 minutes to scarf down a frozen dinner.  I went back to school and helped decorate a room for the coffehouse that night.  Then, it was time for the first session. 

The first lady was a music therapist that worked with special education children at a school district.  She explained that there are a lot of steps that go into referring a child and working with them.  There is so much documentation involved in the music therapy career.  The reason is that it is such a new profession that it has to continue to be proven.  Documentation kind of serves as research for the field.  Hopefully one day people will accept music therapy as a working method for intervention.  It does so much that physical therapy, occupational therapy, phsychotherapy, and many other therapies cannot do alone.  It aids and facilatates an interactive and sometimes fun way to approach those problems or issues people are having.

Next, we heard another music therapist talk about psych with teens.  She explained that you can't just go in and make them listen to a song and analyze it.  A better technique to use would be song writing or fill-in-the-blank songs.  With these types of interventions, you can take a familiar song or even compose your own and have patients fill in different words that would fit their situation better.  Here is an example:

I feel like I need to ___
I want to change ___
Today is the day
Today is the day

That was an example of a song that you can compose and then fill it in and put a melody to it.

So after that, we all had to go back to the room to decorate and put up the lights.  It turns out that right before we started, the breaker blew!  The whole room (the size of a large band hall) was lighted by a single lamp!  During my teachers performance the lights came back on, thank goodness.  More performances went on that were absolutely amazing.  People playing piano and singing, singing their own songs that they had written, and TREMENDOUS guitar skills.  I was the last student performer to sing and I was sooooo nervous!  I am not that great on guitar so following all the great skills was really freaking me out.  So I got up on the stage shaking a little bit and sang "Hallelujah".  I think it went better than I expected.  I tried to slip in some high notes in there as much as a I could :).  So here it is in the link below if you would like to listen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC_hxCCDXmQ



So I hope everyone has a wonderful week and a blessed night.  Thanks so much for reading!  Continue to check back for more blogs, I am going to try to write one every 2-3 days at the least.

Ashley @ SHSU