A message from Clive Robbins

Photograph: Nick Hampton OAM, Director with Clive Robbins at the Golden Stave Music Therapy Centre in 2007

Adventure and Discovery in Improvisation:
Opening the Way for Creativity in Music Therapy Practice

As so much of our work revolves around improvisation, I thought it would be apt and maybe helpful to offer the following thoughts on this glorious, challenging, and rejuvenating subject.

Many music therapy trainees are understandably, but unnecessarily, fearful of improvisation. Consider the amount of improvisation already in your life. Almost every conversation you have is improvisational—no one has scripted it. In addition, if you have a special agenda in a discussion you become skilful in how you use the elements of speech and the expressive powers of your mind and voice. You can do these things because you have an extensive vocabulary of verbal communication and, to an individual extent, the skill and confidence to use it. You are also familiar from listening to others and from what you have absorbed from movies and television, with distinct styles and patterns of expression. You have hundreds of models in your auditory memory of different ways of expressing yourself. If you are in an intense discussion or an argument you can become inspired in the way you are moved to use your verbal resources.

It is basically the same with regard to music and clinical improvisation in therapy practice: therapists need a practical vocabulary of music, and to be comfortable with different styles and patterns of musical expression. The more music that therapists make themselves familiar with, the more practical resources will they have at their fingertips and in their voices. Just as in speech, with its rules of grammar, sentence construction, and different options of syntax, so in music there are the formal procedures of harmonic progression, melodic construction, and rhythmic order. These are the compositional elements that facilitate and shape musical expression

There is the mistaken view that in order to improvise a person has to be completely free. This is misleading, because for an improvisation to have musical coherence and direction it must be formed on selected compositional elements. There is an intimate connection between composition and improvisation—both are concerned with the same activity, making and forming music. Composition is the creation of music free from any demands of the immediacy of execution, improvisation is the creating of music in the moment and from moment to moment—composing in the living now. Both modes of creation use the same structural resources.

To create, not knowing the outcome is an adventure. To work creatively with clients is to open new ways of making discoveries—discoveries about clients, about music, about oneself, and how they interrelate. To undertake a creative approach to music therapy is to challenge yourself to take greater ownership of your musical nature, your creative resources, and your capacities for communication and expression. The creative venture needs backing up with responsibility and careful documentation. Appropriate psychological theories help map out the terrain, identify procedures, and disclose therapeutic processes.

To practice “creative music therapy” is to start living more of your life at the threshold of your artistic and developmental potential. It invites therapists to trust music-making—musicing—as a means of reaching out and of searching within, and as an instrument of clinical research.

Best wishes,
Clive Robbins
New York 2006