We're very grateful to have you talking with us today because our topic is about how music can reflect the psyche and help to improve mental health. And you are, of course, a world renowned expert on this topic having trained with Mary Priestley directly, and then gone on to a long and luminous career as a music therapist in New York. So I wonder if you could take the opportunity to tell us some of the key facts from your history that have brought you to being in this position of expertise today. >> I took an internship with Mary Priestley who often came to the education in Germany and trained us. There's a whole book on the lectures that she gave there called the Herdecke Lectures, and she was just excellent as a trainer, as a person, as a writer in each and every way. So after I had taken two internships in Analytical Music Therapy and two in Nordoff-Robbins I realised which method felt most comfortable for me to work in. And I completely loved the fact that I could come and work with my dreams in music therapy, I could work with my conflicts, with my shortcomings, with my needs and wants. My dreams, everything, my daydreams, everything. And I got a couple of internships, among other, that one with Mary Priestley in London, and that just blew me away. She worked in a, I would say, I don't know if that exists nowadays, but at that time, it was a very, very big old psychiatric institution called Saint Bernard's. And there was a tremendous amount of people in each room, very little privacy in the hospital. And then Mary Priestley had a little porter cabin on the grounds where people would walk over to, or they would be accompanied over to her. And she worked with people with all sorts of diagnoses, bipolar, psychotic, depression, suicidal, you name it. And their conditions were really, really bad at that time, I felt, but she managed actually to help them greatly in that porter cabin. And there was a huge grand piano and then there was chairs lined up along the side so people could sit, and so she started with psychodynamic movement. And that meant parts of it, of psychodynamic movement, we started with some tensing up and some releasing. So tensing up the body, [SOUND], and then aah. And some breathing exercises that help one to breathe deeply and slower and help decrease the intensity, the tempo of the client, both mentally and physically. And then she would ask the clients to pick some music, she had choices, and then we would move to some music that was picked by the patients. Then we would process it and then after that, some improvised music. She had some instruments that we could improvise on, and there was a theme that was elicited by the group with her help and we would just improvise over that theme, and then afterwards, again, some talk. And then a deep relaxation in the end where people would sit in their chairs and just close their eyes and listen to played piano music on the big piano. And that music could be either made up or [FOREIGN] or something like Debussy, very slow, pretty, beautiful, or maybe a guided imagery floating down the river in a boat, with very few instructions. But having the music really transport you to a place where you're very relaxed, and then in the end, each person when they were coming back to the room would say one word, how it was. >> Mm. >> Yeah. >> So what you're talking about there is using a lot of different approaches. So there's listening to client selected preferred music, there's improvising, which means making up music freely without any expectation of knowing how to play an instrument, but to express oneself. Followed by then the opportunity to process and talk about what that music might have meant and what it might be pointing to, and then also using music for relaxation, live music played by a therapist. I assume so that Mary Priestley could adjust the tempo and adjust the way that she was playing to reflect as people relaxed more into it. >> Yeah, anyone can be in music therapy, anyone can work with themselves, if they want. Nobody has to be musical. Most of my clients at the hospital have basically no experience in music. They listen to the radio but that was all. Anyone can do it. It has nothing to do with talent or for that sake, interest at all. Anyone, the work can be done, you don't have to have a special flair for it or nothing like that.