Music can coordinate movement and also touch your soul, says Sarah Hoskyns.
The music therapist, and associate professor, speaks to Upbeat ahead of the Music Therapy New Zealand Symposium. Armed with three pieces of music of her own choosing, she explains how humans can be moved by music, in ways both seen and unseen.
Sarah, who is also the programme director of the Master of Music Therapy at Victoria University, seems to have been predestined for a career in the industry.
Photo: Supplied
Describing trips to the local retirement home as a child, she conjures visions of the iconic von Trapp family. She and her father, a general practitioner, would regularly visit the elderly, their musical instruments in tow.
“The elderly space moved me,” she says. “I felt I had something to bring to it.”
Working as a nurse in the same retirement home, she soon realised her skills were better suited to singing, rather than folding bed sheets at right angles.
It was at this point her official training in music therapy began.
When asked to describe the practice of music therapy she offers a number of approximations – it’s related to other types of therapies, certainly, but a music therapist is also an improvising musician, an accompanist. They are composers creating music with other people.
“It’s closely related to medicine because it is both a science and an art," Sarah says.
But a more official definition of music therapy is building relationships to enable people to fulfil their goals. The benefits of music can be both tangible, like improving someone's gait after a stroke, but also intangible, it can lift people's moods and support them emotionally.
“People quickly understand that music moves you in a way that is hard to describe.”
Rapid changes in the new millennium mean Sarah's students learn a practice that differs from her own, original training. She explains that music therapy used to be far more medicalised, and the relationship was closer to that of a traditional doctor and patient.
Greater understanding of psychology and psychotherapy prompted changes among practitioners a few decades ago, and in more recent times Sarah says socio-cultural changes have greatly informed the practice.
The Symposium next weekend is a time to get people together and celebrate what has been achieved, she says. A chance to see old friends, and reinforce new therapies and ideas.
Listen to Sarah walk host David Morriss through her music choices, and explain what it takes to become a music therapist.
The starting point? Empathy and compassion for people.
The Music Therapy New Zealand Symposium will take place in Christchurch from August 13 - 15.
Applications to attend close Friday August 6.
Music details:
Christine and The Queens: Tilted
SCHUBERT: Impromptu Op 90 No 3 D 899 G flat major performed by Alfred Brendel
Don McGlashan: Kōrukutia / Bathe in the River translated into te reo Māori by Tweedie Waititi and performed by Hollie Smith
