World Music Therapy Week, April 10-15
Music therapists across the globe are celebrating World Music Therapy Week to advocate for the benefits of music therapy to improve lives all over the world. While music may sound different from land to land, music has similarities in how we express our humanity.
Did you know most countries use music in play, to accompany work, tell stories of our ancestry or culture, support spiritual identities, celebrate, sooth babies, learn information (such as the alphabet song), support times of mourning, or for simple enjoyment? Music is an accessible companion that expresses who we are and validates our emotions. While music is in one sense is a universal language; it is in another sense deeply personal and effects each individual in a unique way. Music therapists around the world understand this and know how to provide counseling and use music in a clinical way to support and validate each person’s growth in all areas of the human experience, including:
- Physical goals, such as learning to improve gait or hold an eating utensil
- Cognitive goals, such as recovering from a brain injury and relearning a phone number
- Trauma recovery
- Supporting spiritual distress,
- Relationship support
- Sensory stimulation
- Coping support
- And, of course, end-of-life support
All music therapists around the world are held to a high academic standard with rigorous study at the university level, and continue an evidence-based practice throughout their careers.
Not all countries provide hospice care, but those that do often employ music therapists as an integral part of care. Music therapy is consistently growing in the area of end-of-life care and it makes sense. Just as the process of dying effects all domains of the human experience, so does music.
Music therapists are trained experts for sitting at bedside during end of life to bear witness; offer a container for what can feel unbearable; help ease pain, anxiety, and respiratory distress; reflect feelings that are difficult to express; and offer connection for friends and families in ways that were once thought impossible.
Here in the United States we are honored to serve and support so many people from all over the world. As I write this, I am thinking of a song that a patient once taught me who immigrated here many years ago, and to this day remains one of my favorite hymns due to the fact that it was truly this person’s personal anthem. In this time of international turmoil, it has become my anthem as well.
This is My Song
This is my song, Oh God of all the nations
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh, hear my song, Oh God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.
