The work of Mary Priestley

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En provenance du cours de The University of Melbourne

How Music Can Change Your Life

79 notes

The University of Melbourne

How Music Can Change Your Life

79 notes

Did you ever wonder how music works? This course provides free video, audio and journal resources that explain six basic principles about how music can influence individual and community health and wellbeing. From biology and neuroscience, to psychotherapy and politics, the ways we engage with music can make all the difference. Music has always played an integral role in the lives of individuals and communities all around the globe. This course explores the ways that music can be used to achieve positive changes with a particular emphasis on the most vulnerable persons. Six different understandings will be explored, each with their own set of values and assumptions. The greatest thinkers in each approach believe that their way of explaining the power of music is right, but we will show that understanding music in its entirety delivers the best results in each unique circumstance. Once we understand the various ways that music can change the world, we can make informed decisions about how best to employ its extraordinary power. Learners who engage in this MOOC can expect to both deepen and broaden their understanding of how music can be used with individuals, groups and communities. Specifically: • To distinguish between how music works on the body, in the brain, through the unconscious, for bonding, as political action and in reflecting culture, • To design practical programs that utilise music to support individuals, groups and communities based on examples shared in the ‘on-site’ case studies. View the MOOC promotional video here: http://tinyurl.com/jnde3w3

À partir de la leçon

How can music reflect the psyche to improve mental health?

Music can be a powerful way to explore and comprehend our deepest emotions. When used in psychoanalysis, this can lead to rich experiences that may even reveal aspects of our unconscious world that can be processed within the safety of the therapeutic relationship. Within the field of music therapy, practitioners often debate the relative merits of free improvisation on instruments in comparison to using the preferred songs of clients in therapy. Both afford opportunities to deepen our understanding of ourselves and our relationships to others, and music more generally can be used as a health resource that travels with us as we recover from being acutely unwell and continue the journey of life.

Unit 3 introduction - part 1 of 28:58

Unit 3 introduction - part 2 of 25:03

Psychodynamic therapy perspective - introduction1:39

Psychodynamic therapy perspective9:01

Introducing Benedikte Scheiby1:59

The work of Mary Priestley6:02

Individual music therapy11:27

Music and emotions7:51

Research and theoretical foundations14:33

Rencontrer les enseignants

Katrina Skewes McFerran
Professor
Melbourne Conservatorium of Music

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.

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