The Healing Properties of Music Therapy

We hope you enjoy this inspiring podcast that explores how music therapy helps people heal.

If I had to give up all other therapies, if I could only keep one on board, I would choose music therapy in a heartbeat, because as I said before she encompasses so many other areas.

This has been brought to you by the show Thinking Out Loud and KBIA 91.3. Below is a transcript of the podcast.

Darren:
Good evening and welcome to Thinking Out Loud on KBIA. Music plays a special role in our lives. But it can also have healing properties as well. We all know of music that can lift our spirit. But it can also be a part of organized therapy with the disabled, mentally ill, and lots of others.

Tonight on Thinking Out Loud Trevor Harris explores the healing properties of music. We look at music therapy at a state school here in Columbia and he also talks to a man who’s on Columbia streets making music for us all to enjoy, even during the recent cold snap. That’s next, Thinking Out Loud on KBIA.

Trevor:
During the colder months of the year some activities slow down. Cold temperatures and regular freezing, precipitation put a cramp in numerous outdoor activities. That includes making music. Music festivals take a hiatus for the colder months and those instrumentalists hit the woodshed to workout pieces for the coming performance season. Numerous musicians keep working, whether indoors or out. My name is Trevor Harris and this week on Thinking Out Loud we look at a local basker and a music therapist who keep sharing their music craft with the public and their clients throughout the cold winter months.

We’ll also hear a testimonial from a caregiver of a young man with shaken-baby syndrome discussing how music therapy is changing his life one session at a time. Take a stroll down Ninth Street in Columbia most Fridays and you’ll encounter Raven Wolf, also known as C. Felton Jennings blowing a saxophone in front of Lakota Coffee shop.

(music)

Stop for a bit and Raven Wolf will share with you his philosophy of music, why he does what he does. The Saint Louis native is in his fifth year of presenting what he calls his magical mystical meditation concerts. To the uniformed it may look like Raven Wolf is merely basking for spare change. Take the time to stop and talk with him, and he’ll tell you that each week he travels up to 1200 miles between Memphis in Kansas City, Columbia, and Lawrence. His 18 hour long live concerts in front of Lakota and other venues have a goal of no less than healing the world one heart at a time. I’ll best let Raven Wolf describe that process to you himself.

Raven:
Well music is a healing force in and of itself. There are many ways that people receive healing. First of all I don’t heal people. People heal themselves. What music does for that person or for any person is it sparks or rekindles that healing ability that their body does naturally. Understanding that principle … I’m also involved in reiki healing that kind of thing. I put that in the music. On the principle of entrainment it works. I set the vibration for love, joy, peace, and healing. Those vibrations move through the music.

Trevor:
Entrainment is a word that maybe not everybody knows. Can you give me the definition how you define entrainment?

Raven:
Certainly, certainly. Entrainment, one tuning fork is vibrating at a certain frequency and you bring a tuning fork near it that isn’t vibrating at all, it will soon begin to vibrate at that same frequency as the one that is vibrating. That is entrainment. That’s the principle of entrainment.

That’s the case with these albums. The frequency has been set by this tuning fork, Raven Wolf, and spirit of jazz and it’s been set for healing, a healing sound. So anyone, any person, with an ear or vibration animal, mineral, vegetable, that comes near to it, it also becomes entrained. Its frequency becomes like, “Oh, I recognize that vibration. I’ve always known that vibration.” But we live in a very time pressed society and we’re terribly distracted by a number of different types of frequencies and vibrations. This is just one that just kind of like retrains and resets what it is that the body does naturally, heal itself completely.

Trevor:
So what do you aspire to…what do you want to see happen with your music? And you’ve talked about these are the magical mystery…

Raven:
Magical, mystical meditation concerts. What do I like to see happen? You know I haven’t thought quite that far. I like to be able to continue with them and to move into other cities and share this music.

Trevor:
But what’s happening in individual hearts and bodies when you’re out here blowing your sax and I walk by, maybe I am for 30 seconds, maybe I sit and listen for five minutes, in a perfect world, what do you want to see happen with people who absorb in your music on the street here in Columbia?

Raven:
Well this is a perfect world that we live in. Folks, this is a perfect world. Believe it or not it is. The universe, there’s nothing wrong with it. Having said that much, what does happen is people are happy. For one split second or one small moment their mind is taken away from those distractions and once again turns to their heart, that part of us that pulses, that part of us that sends out the goodness that it is, the joy, the love, and the healing that our bodies were meant to do for this universe, for this world.

Trevor:
Raven Wolfs comment about healing got me thinking about how people use music. He’s got it right that people can benefit profoundly from music. Besides just using it for relaxation or inspiration, some people actively use music to heal others. Looking for an example of this I sought out and found Columbia-based board certified music therapist Kristin Veteto.

Kristin:
My name is Kristin Noel Veteto and I’m a board certified music therapist and I work here in Columbia. I have my bachelors in Music Therapy. I have a BMT from Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, and then I have my masters from Colorado State University.

Within our graduate degree you have to do four years of your curriculum and that includes everything. You have to be a full on music student. You’re learning piano, and guitar, and drums, and conducing, doing all of those types of things with the music school. But you also take health and sciences and psychology and neurobiology and sciences and things like that. Then after your four years of curriculum you do a six month internship. I did mine at a large hospital in Chicago.

Trevor:
I asked the local music therapist to define for me exactly what music therapy is.

Kristin:
Music therapy is the art I would say of using music to target on musical goals. For example, I would do similar things to what a speech therapist would do, but I would use music because of the way that music is processed in the brain. Music can access speech and speech areas in the brain a little bit better than just speech therapy on its own.

We work on physical, motor or sensory motor we call it, speech and language that can include actual verbalizations, that can also include augmentated devices like a DynaVox and Vmax, and then cognition, and psychology goes under that heading of psychology, but also social and emotional. Spiritual it is really engaged in music. We can target every area. But our goal is not to teach them music. Our goal is a non-musical goal.

Trevor:
Kristen Veteto works with students at Delmar Cobble Columbia State School for the disabled. She also does home based music therapy sessions throughout mid Missouri. While her settings are mostly with children, Veteto explained that music therapists work with a diverse range of clients of all ages and backgrounds. The typical session, it lasts about an hour and contains elements that are part of the work plan she creates with her clients, their caregivers, and other therapists. When a client comes in, when you first have contact with that client, what’s the process like?

Kristin:
Typically you’d have some sort of greeting, or a hello with kids, a hello song, or some sort of intervention where you’re focusing, you’re welcoming, you’re getting to know each other, you’re building that relationship, that therapeutical relationship and rapport with that client. Then, you typically move on to, I like to go into sensory, whether that is a listening, whether that is an actual physical moving for sensory integration, moving in, listening, or just listening and seeing also, integrating all of those sensors.

Then, you typically will work on in an hour session between three and four I’d say main goals, depending on what the goals are and how many sub areas to that goal are necessary. Then you have your middle where it’s your core work where you’re now, because you’ve had your sensory, because you’ve had your welcome, you’re attending. You’re there, you’re ready to go.

Then, towards the end as we all have this kind of bell curve of where we have this major attention and then you kind of go down and you start to think about other things. Then we’ll hit one more thing before the end, cool down, have a cool down and then with kiddos we do a goodbye song.

Trevor: This is Trevor Harris and you’re listening to Thinking Out Loud on 91.3 FM, KBIA. This week an exploration into how people use music to heal. I recently visited with Columbia based music therapist Kristin Veteto. I asked her what kind of things she expects from her young clients in a typical music therapy session.

Kristin:
It depends on if it’s let say I’m wanting them to do the end of a phrase, so I might be singing a familiar sound, or if it’s like a target word that needs to be at the end of the phrase I specifically make and write a song that leads them up to with melody, it leads up melodically and with tempo, and then with the harmonization so like you go through this process of having, you’re one, four, five are the very typical or maybe even add your minor in, but where you leave it so you haven’t hit that tonic point yet. That tonic is where they will then produce the speech. Their body is physically engaged in. This where the landing is. That’s where the tonic is. This is where I respond.

Trevor:
So your sessions involve movement as well.

Kristin:
Oh my gosh, yes. I don’t just do the music. In fact very typically it’s my students making the music. I just guide them in making it. It’s very, very interactive. It’s them reaching and playing with the guitar. Us playing drums. A number of different musical instruments, egg shakers, and chime bars, and tone bells, and auto harps, and pianos, and sometimes we bang on the walls. Depending on where we’re at and what we’re doing we…

Trevor:
People in the next classroom love that.

Kristin:
Right. Actually at the state school I have do to therapy in the classroom. We have six classrooms and I come in and basically do music with a classroom and I see kids individually, so we’ll either move to a different area. But the idea is that I’m bringing music in to help them do the things that they do every day, whether that’s making choices, or if that’s actually a physical moving and reaching and grasping something, if that’s literally just staying awake for the day. I hit the whole spectrum of needs. But that’s like music. It hits all of our needs.

Trevor:
Music therapy was born from a need for healing that other available therapies were unable to completely provide. Veteto cites the story from the Bible of David playing the harp for King Saul as an example of early music therapy. In more recent times veterans returning from World War One battle found relief listening to and interacting with therapists in veteran administration hospitals in the early 20th century. Academic training programs for music therapists emerged as these artists realized they needed more training to deal with the trauma veterans carried home from the battles and the trenches of war in Europe.

The first music therapy program was founded in 1944 in Michigan State University. Today a query of students can pursue a music therapy degree in Missouri at Drury University, the University of Missouri-Kansas City in Saint Louis, and Maryville University. Veteto shares some examples of music that she’ll play for and with her clients in therapy session. Here is Columbia music therapist Kristin Veteto playing guitar and singing a song that gets her young clients moving and ready to do work in weekly sessions.

Kristin:
I’m going to take you through something that would get us moving, get us pumped, even if you don’t want to, the whole group would be engaged.

(singing)

We’re going to move.
We’re going to move, going to move, going to move right now,
we’re going to move, going to move, going to move.
We’re going to move, going to move, going to move right now,
we’re going to move, going to move right now.
We can go faster, we can go slow. We can move higher, we can move low.
We’re going to move, going to move, going to move right now,
we’re going to move, going to move right now.
We’re going to move, going to move, going to move right now,
we’re going to move, going to move right now.
So march in place, march in place, march in place just like that.
March in place, march in place, march in place.
We’re going to move, move, move like that.
We’re going to move, going to move, going to move right now,
we’re going to move, going to move, going to move.
We’re going to move, going to move, going to move right now,
we’re going to move, going to move right now, yeah.
We can go faster, we can go slow. We can go high, or we can go low.
We can move, we can move, we can move right now,
going to move, going to move right now.
We’re going to move, going to move right now.

Trevor:
Kristin Veteto is a voice and piano student by training, but employs numerous instruments in her group and individual sessions with music therapy clients. Each client has his or her own work plan. As such Veteto, the music therapist, will play pieces of music that fit the client’s needs and mood. From older groups she might play a piece of music that is familiar and from an earlier era.

Kristin:
Let’s go from happy to kind of low sad with Blue Skies. This is really popular in geriatric psych, very popular.

(singing)

Blue skies smiling at me
Nothing but blue skies do I see
Bluebirds singing a song
Nothing but bluebirds all day long

Never saw the sun shining so bright
Never saw things going so right
Noticing the days hurrying by
When you’re in love, my how they fly

Blue days, all of them gone
Nothing but blue skies from now on.
Nothing but blue skies from now on.

Trevor:
I’m interested about the hospitals experience. In the past when you did that, when you had your clients, when you went to them and they were near the end of life, what does music therapy provide to them?

Kristin:
Comfort is really big. Mainly the instances that I had was I worked in a hospital so they were patients. There was one specific instance where I was called in by a husband and his wife and they were older, but not, maybe 70s, 60-70s and she was in a coma, and they were getting ready to take off her life support. So he called the music therapist in and it happened to be me. I had been there a couple of times while she had been in there.

But the thing that I remember is that I was sitting on a stool, right by her bed. The whole family was there, all around me, behind me, and I could see her husband and he just saying so loud, I remember, and this as a music therapist when you go into a hospital situation, the one thing you’re told never to do is to sing Amazing Grace. It’s like the typical classic cheesy. It’s a beautiful song. Well, he requested it, and he requested it over and over and over again.

I think in an hour session, which in a hospital that actually is a pretty long session, but they had taken her off her life support while I was there and she hanged on quite past when I was there. But she was, you could see her response every time her husband would sing, her heart rate would increase. It is an honor to be asked to be in that end of life place. Music in that instant is like blanket, it’s like a hammock where it wraps them, it holds them, and it allows them to cry or not cry, whatever they feel they need to do. But you’re there for support and for the musical and the support that the structure of the music provides. So it’s a very touching area.

Trevor:
I wanted to ask that question because so much of our conversation this afternoon has been about getting gross motor skills further advanced or teaching people to finish a phrase, or be able to do something if they have very low skills. Obviously in a hospital situation you’re not trying to fix anybody’s anything.

Kristin:
No, no you’re trying to help them transition into whatever comes next for them.

Trevor:
The harps at the pearly gate or whatever…

Kristin:
Yeah, whatever for whatever it is for them. One of the big things that … I’m actually a very spiritual person so I really believe in using music for your spirituality in whatever capacity that is. That’s different for each person. I think that music is one of those places that can be neutral in that way. You can provide it neutrally and then they can take what they need from it.

Then, I remember another instance where I was asked, I came in at eight o’clock in the morning at the hospital and a baby had passed and it’s a baby that I had in ICU that I had played for. And it was the only time the baby would sleep would be when I would come in and play and we’d play lullabies and the only time the mom could get some rest. They called me in that morning, and while they were still holding the baby after she had passed and I was in the middle in this little baby chair, in the middle of her whole family, and played those lullabies and just the whole family was there and was able to start to process that.

Trevor:
How do you process that? How do you walk out of that room and deal with that?

Kristin:
That’s actually a really good question. When you’re there you’re only thinking about your client and their family. I think to be honest after I got done I came back to the room and cried a little bit, kind of process it. Even though I use music for someone else, I use it therapeutically every day. Yeah, you process it differently. That is very hard. But, I think the thing that is overruling in that situation is that, because of the gift that I have of being able to use that music it is an absolute honor to be in that place, to be asked to be there.

Trevor:
That family is going to remember you forever and obviously they’re going to remember that baby forever but you’re part of that baby short, short life.

Kristin:
Yeah. And that is a huge honor. Music is what led me into that.

Trevor:
This week on KBIA’s Thinking Out Loud we’re looking at the healing power of music. We’ve heard from musicians C. Felton Jennings, better known to visitors of Ninth Street in Columbia as Raven Wolf who talked about his work in producing vibrations wherein he aspires to heal the world one heart at a time from sidewalks and other venues across the Midwest. We’ve heard from Columbia music therapist Kristin Veteto.

One of the families who benefit from Veteto’s music therapy is led by Johnna Carrender. Carrender is the caregiver for Taylor. Her step grandson is a victim of shaken-baby syndrome. The results of the abuse Taylor suffered as a baby are profound. At six he remains afflicted by brain injuries. His feat in physical abilities are limited. After he was removed from his parents home, his maternal grandparents took him in and have been providing care for him ever since. Here Carrender talked about what music and music had done for her step grandson, Taylor.

Johnna:
Taylor and I bonded. While he was still in the ICU I felt that music seemed to comfort him and certainly comforted me. Immediately following his injury I began playing music in his hospital room. Once he left the hospital he still maintained that love for music and seemed to exhibit a lot of natural rhythm, loves to sing.

I actually had Taylor here in Columbia for another medical appointment, and a receptionist happened to mention that an acquaintance of hers was a music therapist. And it was just like a God send. It was so…I don’t know, so fortuitous that it worked out. She gave me Kristin’s number and I called her as soon as I got out of the building into the parking lot, and a good relationship began.

We are using Taylor’s love of music to motivate him to use music as incentives to help him accomplish other non-musical goals. Taylor, in the past, did not use his right arm and hand. He didn’t have a functional grasp even with his left hand. Those are just two things that we have worked on with Miss Kristin.

We use rhythm sticks, we use drum mallets to help him maintain a grasp. Taylor loves to strum Miss Kristin guitar. Through strumming her guitar he has started to stretch his fingers out, extend his fingers open, his hands, both hands up to strum a guitar and to play drums. Yes, that’s right.

He’s more attentive. He’s a happy boy. He’s more attentive when we read books to him. He will look … I mentioned that he has cortical blindness and so he is better about looking and finding objects like bells, chimes, drums, egg shakers, things like that, things that will give an auditory stimulus. He will now turn his head both to the right and to the left, perhaps even look up, to find the object that Miss Kristin is playing. So he’s really improved on that. Saying his version of hello, his vocalizations have increased.

Trevor:
I asked Johnna Carrender, the grandmother of brain injured Taylor, what her grandson gets from music and the therapy that Kristin Veteto provides. She was quick and clear with her answer. Music has improved Taylor’s life in profound ways.

Johnna:
If I had to give up all other therapies, if I could only keep one on board, I would choose music therapy in a heartbeat, because as I said before she encompasses so many other areas.

Trevor: This week on Thinking Out Loud we’ve heard from a range of voices discussing and demonstrating how music can heal past traumas or just refocus the scattered mind. Music can enter our brain unconsciously, gripping in and influencing our mood, or such as during music therapy sessions like those Kristen Veteto has with Taylor and his grandma Johnna Carrender, the music is intentional and played in active pursuit of real life goals. For KBIA this is Trevor Harris.

Darren:
And our thanks once again to Trevor for an excellent program and to all of his guests on this evening’s program. That was a good show tonight. Well, that’s it for this evening for Thinking Out Loud. Make sure to join us next week on the program. Nathan Anderson will be in the director of the University of Missouri Concert Series there are some terrific shows coming up in the second half of the 2013-2014 Season. We’ll preview the next part of the University Concert Series season.

In a couple of weeks getting ready for Martin Luther King Day here on the University of Missouri Campus. There’s lots coming up on the weeks to come. Tuesday evenings be sure to join us each week for Thinking Out Loud on KBIA. [Inaudible 00:28:17] and Saturday mornings for Thinking Out Loud Saturday Sports on KBIA as well. Until then for Trevor Harris I’m Darren Hellwege. Have a great evening.