Music Therapy, part 2: Expressive Aspect

As I said in Part 1, music therapy is a healing modality that relies on the power of music.

Music is healing not only when you listen to it, but also, sensibly enough, when you make it.

Expressive Aspect

Music therapy can be used expressively to actively get troublesome energies out from where they are stored in the body, psyche, mind and spirit.

For example, a therapist may support a client to feel freed up and empowered to explore drumming, which has the effect of releasing trauma response energy that has been held in her body. Playing instrumental music together, finding harmonies and soothing, holding long tones can help create containment and safety in the body.

Singing, in addition to the benefits it gifts through engaging breath, lungs, diaphragm and throat, likewise carries energy from inside to the outside, helping with externalization and release.

In general, music facilitates the completion of psychic processes, and serves as a bridge from inner to outer, so that trapped energies can be transmitted to the outside, where they can be engaged with more neutrally and with more insight.

The point of expressive music is to get it out of your body. You can express your angst and you can express your joy, your deepest and most wordless feelings. The musical creation itself, while still important, is less the point in this way of using music, than the experience and the transformative effects.

My invitation to you for exploring the Expressive Aspect of music:

Using just your body (claps, snaps, stomps, breath sounds, voice) and/or using an instrument if you have one, play along to a piece of recorded music.

Turn the music up loud enough so you feel fully immersed, but not so loud that you cannot hear your own sounds. Together with the artists who made the recording, you are creating a shared soundscape. This is for your private explorations, not for making anything in particular. (You may need to tell your inner critic to relax a few times, this is for experimentation not performance).

Easiest is to play along to something which does not have a lot of rhythmic or tonal changes, such as a repetitive drum beat:

https://youtu.be/Nh_d7LGIOCg

Or a drone:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qVyPyO__hs

Or something like this, which has many stages, as well as a drone and rhythmic aspect:

https://youtu.be/hEzO947WtZU

But of course, if you’d rather play along to Biz Markie, do that. Why not?

https://youtu.be/9aofoBrFNdg?t=39

If you would like something with chord changes, then use a song you love or an acoustic cover of a song that’s not too incredibly complex.

Picking a song that’s familiar to you can be a help. Here’s an example using a song you may know:

https://youtu.be/bhNuDjKcyUk

But obviously you should follow your own self.

I think it can also be nice to just do something you don’t know too well, but you like the sound of, like this beautiful thing:

https://youtu.be/uKpgqVPcv7g

I have even tried playing along to very rich, beautiful complex music full of millions of changes, and it was weirdly satisfying, which does not mean that I made anything “good”, but that in the trying I was changed:

https://youtu.be/yJpJ8REjvqo?t=2

Obviously the hardest thing will be to take a song with a complicated melody & rhythm, with a lot of chord changes, and expect yourself to play along with it “correctly” on a melodic instrument. But if you are willing to play around, make some musical mess, including some terrible sounds possibly, and just see what happens, you’re on your way.

I’ll repeat it in case your inner critic missed it the first time: We’re not talking about making amazing music, just learning to let ourselves play around, and that means making bad sounds too. Follow what feels juicy, weirdly compelling to do, or that which tugs on your curiosity.

Have fun :)

Play around with the Creative Aspect of music in part 3!