Music Therapy: Another Industry Working Around COVID-19
Amy Recchia, the owner of AR Music Therapy in Kingston, is used to going house to house providing music therapy. She’s been doing that for a quarter of a century. Her business specializes in working with individualized residential alternatives, group homes that focus on promoting independence.
Back in December Recchia, 49, almost had to close because of the COVID-19 pandemic and clients being apprehensive about online music therapy.
“It’s impossible to play music together at the same time virtually. The technology doesn’t allow it,” said Recchia.
This made Recchia adapt her practice from communal music making to online call and response music lessons. However, it is just not the same.
“When you listen to music recorded or when you go to a live music show, like a concert, it’s different,” said Recchia. “It loses something, it really does. It’s difficult to not be present in the same moment at the same time.”
As the months went by and the pandemic continued, patients of AR Music Therapy became willing to try the online format, helping save Recchia’s business.
“I wonder sometimes when we open back up to in-person services, if there’s anybody who’s going to want to just keep the virtual,” said Recchia with a laugh. “You know, we’ve gotten used to it and it’s like a little less invasive than having somebody come to your home and you can have your PJs on and you know whatever. It’ll be interesting to see when the time comes.”
Despite some people’s growing comfortability and familiarity with the new normal, there is a variable and X factor that the online medium cannot provide.
When she was in high school, Recchia got a job overseeing recreational activities at Taconic Developmental Disabilities Services Center in Wassaic, New York, for people with various ailments. She would often bring her guitar and sing for the group. One day, one of the patients at the spur of the moment got up and started singing “Amazing Grace” while Recchia strummed.
“I could tell by the look on all the staff’s faces like something incredible was happening,” Recchia remembered.
Recchia was told after the spontaneous jam session that the woman who got up to collaborate used to be a singer, but her cancer diagnosis caused her to keep quiet and to herself most of the time.
That event caught the attention of the music therapy program at the developmental center and resulted in her landing her first job in the industry. She went on to receive her bachelor’s degree in the practice from SUNY New Paltz in 1995.
Since then in her over 25 years of performing this healing art, Recchia has not been devoid of those miraculous moments of healing through music.
She remembers working with a young girl (who, for confidentiality, will be referred to as T), who struggled with speech and verbalization due to autism. In the sessions, there would often be barriers that would get in the way of the music like the lights or a picture on the wall not agreeing with T.
It wasn’t until one day in a group session that T yelled “NO!” at another child whose musical choice she did not agree with. Everyone was shocked at the breakthrough, causing the music to come to a halt.
“I was not a seasoned therapist at that point. I was like ‘you know, a good music therapist would have kept going,’” Recchia said with a laugh.
By getting a sense of patients’ taste, music therapists can select songs where an emotional, personal connection may be strong. By focusing on the music, patients can pay less attention to their physical pain. It can even access memories and speech, through singing, for those suffering cognitive decline caused by dementia.
Although recreational music listening does have positive effects, like improving overall well-being and reducing anxiety, it is different. Music therapy is a practice overseen by a trained professional.
The process has proven to decrease symptoms of depression, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, which provides access to biomedical and genomic information. According to Harvard Women’s Health Watch, it has also been shown to reduce anxiety, can restore lost speech, reduce the side effects of chemotherapy, help with physical therapy and rehabilitation, aid pain relief and improve the quality of life for people with dementia.
As a music therapist and hospice worker, Terry Blaine goes house to house spending time with senior citizens. Hospice patients are, by default, close to death, and are dealing with a variety of physical and mental ailments.
Blaine is just trying to make them comfortable for the inevitable.
“The music provides the container for everybody to be together in that moment, whether it’s a sad moment, or a difficult moment, or a challenging moment or if it’s just a beautiful moment,”
A very frail and thin woman in her 40s sat upright in a chair at the Hudson Valley Hospice Center in Kingston, New York, counting the days until she will be brought home to spend her remaining time in a familiar place.
The woman, quietly succumbing to her cancer, requests that Blaine sing “His Eye Is On The Sparrow,” an old gospel hymn originally written in 1905. The patient’s eyes close awaiting the song to start.
‘Why should I feel discouraged/Why should the shadows come/Why should my heart be lonely/And long for heaven, heaven and home/When, when Jesus is my portion/My constant Friend is He/Oh, oh-oh, his eye is on the sparrow/And I know He watched, watched it over me/I sing because I’m happy/I sing because I’m free/For His eye, his eye is on the sparrow/And I know, I know He watches over me,’ Blaine sang as the woman slightly swayed back and forth with her eyes closed.
When Blaine finished her acapella rendition, the woman opened her eyes and said “That was perfect. That expresses where I am right now.”
Blaine offered to perform another song, but the woman refused, saying that was all she needed.
That was in 2009, and Blaine’s first and last encounter with the woman.
Terry Blaine. Photo: Terry Blaine
Blaine is able to see the beauty of working with people who are facing the edge of mortality. She remains present when the final breaths of patients are near. Providing relief to a family gathered around their ailing loved one by emitting a serene, but not forced, soundtrack.
“The music provides the container for everybody to be together in that moment, whether it’s a sad moment, or a difficult moment, or a challenging moment or if it’s just a beautiful moment,” she said.
“It’s kind of this great privilege to be there. It’s sort of like being present at a birth, but the opposite.”
Over the course of her 18 and a half year career, Blaine has had no shortage of emotional musical moments with patients.
Between 2016 and 2019, Blaine cared for a man suffering with pneumonia. For confidentiality, he will be referred to as D. When D realized on their first meeting that she was not going to just play recordings, tears streamed down his face.
“Oh my God, you’re going to play live?” D said in disbelief. “I never thought I would have music in my home again.”
This form of therapy allows people facing death an avenue to express themselves and talk about their feelings. In this session, D told Blaine about how he used to be a traveling musician and how his battle with pneumonia has completely hindered his ability to go out and see live music, changing his relationship with the medium.
“These are some really important things that people face and the music can help them through that,” said Blaine. “The music can kind of loosen things up or if they don't want to talk about their feelings, they could talk about the song.”
“We’re using music in a goal directed way,” said Kathleen Murphy, the director of the music therapy program at SUNY New Paltz. “We pick music based on a lot of factors.”
Life memories are a good example as music can often send people to a specific time and place. If a patient used to vacation at the Jersey Shore and a music therapist plays a song related to that, like “Under The Boardwalk” by The Drifters, their memories and senses connected to that time can come back.
“If you find a song that they know, they’re able to access it because it is attached to music,” said Blaine speaking on music therapy’s effect on people with dementia.
“That’s why when we hear music it taps that emotional and memory part of our brains,” said Murphy.
Blaine remembers observing an intern working with a man who was skeptical about the efficacy. He was “crusty” as Blaine described him and did not want to talk about his emotions. Blaine and the intern had to trust that the music was going to tell him what he was feeling.
“It’s kind of this great privilege to be there. It’s sort of like being present at a birth, but the opposite,”
Hank Williams’ “I’m Going Home” was the guarded man’s song of choice.
‘When my work here is over and trial come no more/On that great day I’m going home/To live forever more, just on heaven’s shore/When my life is over I’m going home,’ as the lyrics referring to death go.
“So he didn't want to talk about it but that's the song he chose,” said Blaine. “So that gives the clinician or the music therapist, or all the people in the room that were there with him, insight into what he might be thinking or feeling.”
But it is not just the lyrics and memorable melodies that have positive effects; the rhythm and tempo of a song is also very beneficial.
“There is a motor response when there’s rhythm that kind of happens automatically,” said Murphy. “We’re working with people who have gait disorders, or need to coordinate their movements, that the rhythm is going to help make the movements more efficient.”
Take the case of former United States Representative Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head in a supermarket parking lot in 2011, suffering severe head trauma and damaging the part of the brain that translates thoughts to speech. Through music therapy, Giffords was able to regain her ability to speak and structure sentences through singing.
Despite the scientific evidence of music therapy, the indescribable nature of how music makes us feel along with the different preferences of each individual still plays a prominent role in recovery.
“It’s all kind of interconnectedness at the deepest, deepest level, you know, at the cellular level,” said Blaine. “A lot of it is stuff beyond our comprehension, but we see that it works.”
“The Very Best Of Hank Williams” record. Photo: Nick Califra
Blaine’s relationship with music precedes her time in health care. A former singer, she played clubs and worked in studios in New York City starting in 1973, where she developed her knack and comfortability with performing. Her career took a different route after attending a Buddhist lecture on death and dying, which she says led her to become a music therapy volunteer. That made her enter the SUNY New Paltz music therapy program in 2003 and brought her to her current job at Hudson Valley Hospice in 2008.
This type of care is still a very new science. The National Association for Music Therapy was started in 1950 and the practice can sometimes struggle for funding and exposure.
“We are still America’s best kept secret,” said Murphy.
The Sound Health Network, an organization that promotes research and public awareness about the impact of music on health and wellness, is looking to change that. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded $20 million to the Sound Health Initiative, a partnership between the NIH and the Kennedy Center, to research music’s benefits to a variety of neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease and victims of strokes.
Although the moments that heal and allow people to reach goals is rewarding, music, and people’s natural gravitation to it, is still the center of the process. At least it is for Rick Soshensky, the founder and director of Creative Arts Therapy Studio in Kingston, which opened in 2012.
“I call it a studio as opposed to something more clinical like a clinic or a center or a program or something,” said Shoshensky. “My idea really is that people come there, mostly people with pretty significant disabilities, and we find a way to make music together.”
“There’s something about engaging in music that is just very healthy...Not everybody needs a music therapist, but everybody does need to figure out how to incorporate music.”
At what first he thought of as just a job, he quickly discovered he had a knack for. After his father told him about a commercial he saw on TV about Music Therapy, he enrolled and got his Master’s Degree from New York University in 1992 and later went on to study at the Nordoff-Robbins Center for Music Therapy in New York City.
Soshensky’s patients often have autism, mental illness or other disabilities that make it difficult for them to function in the everyday world. He wants to expose them to something they may not have experienced before, allowing them to discover a talent they may not know they possess. This gives his patients a sense of belonging, self-esteem and engagement that others may not provide them while they develop a knack for music and their own artistry.
“Getting into music is an alternative form of communication,” said Soshensky.
Somebody who may be blocked in other forms of communication and self-expression can find another route and flourish while working with music, he believes.
Soshensky just started working with Nicky, a 13 year old boy with autism. Nicky suffers with discipline and attention span issues. He is not able to sit still for more than 30 seconds at a time and roams from one room to the next in his house. Shoshensky thinks he will most likely be institutionalized and medicated.
Soshensky would prefer to work with Nicky at his school where distractions are limited but COVID protocols make that an impossibility.
The sessions with Nicky have been difficult. He will often get up to get snacks, jump on the couch or wait for his mother to step in to tend to his every need on top of his disinterest in the musical subject matter.
Soshensky has been down this road before with patients struggling with similar symptoms. To combat it, he tries to set up musical phrases that are difficult to resist completing like the call and response of the Spongebob Squarepants theme song.
‘Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?, SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS!’
Soshensky has even turned ‘Jingle Bells’ into a goodbye song as the singular rhythmic melody is extremely recognizable as it can be clapped out without vocals.
‘Now it’s time, now it’s time/Time to say goodbye/Time to say goodbye to Nick/It’s time to say goodbye,’ as Soshensky’s rendition goes.
Guitar into light. Photo: Nick Califra
It is too early to tell whether this type of therapy works for Nicky, but Soshensky has had success with autistic patients before using these techniques, it may just take time.
Soshensky, who had been a successful professional musician, says the tools of his therapy chafe against traditional “Western culture, which tends to look at music as a form of entertainment and not that important.”
“Like you know it’s not serious business, it’s something you do to relax or to have fun or it’s not a serious part of life.”
Although the prevalence of the practice of music therapy in modern society may not be huge, there is no denying the role music plays in our everyday emotional functionality and in people’s medical goals and recovery.
“There’s something about engaging in music that is just very healthy,” said Murphy, the music therapy director at SUNY New Paltz. “Not everybody needs a music therapist, but everybody does need to figure out how to incorporate music.”