Developing a Guitar-Based Approach in Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article addresses the use of guitar in Nordoff-Robbins music therapy. Nordoff-Robbins has long been identified as an exclusively piano-based model and, as such, the extant literature has not closely examined the use of guitar within the approach. A two-year course of music therapy at the New York Nordoff-Robbins Center with a young boy diagnosed with Pervasive Developmental Disorder will be followed with the therapist utilizing guitar as the primary instrument. Interventions influenced by the guitar's unique characteristics will be illustrated as will the integration of styles often associated with guitar such as rock, funk, country, and folk. The client's clinical process and the therapist's musical choices and rationales will be discussed in the context of key principles of Nordoff-Robbins music therapy. As only the third person to focus on guitar as my primary instrument during the certification training program at the New York Nordoff-Robbins Center, I felt as if I needed to integrate 40-plus years of Nordoff-Robbins history with my identity as a musician. Piano was firmly established as the definitive instrument of Nordoff-Robbins music therapy while I was a guitarist/singer with stylistic roots primarily in rock, folk, and blues. The extraordinary command (both technically and clinically) in Paul Nordoff's classically influenced piano approach seemed to establish a legacy so formidable as to appear practically impossible for a primary therapist to play another instrument and still call it Nordoff-Robbins music therapy. The acceptance of guitar in Nordoff-Robbins was notably influenced by the work of New York Center co-directors, Alan Turry and Kenneth Aigen, documented in Aigen's (2001, 2002) publications examining the clinical application of popular styles such as rock, jazz, blues, and country. These included examples of work with guitar and bass guitar, offering important insights into the use of these instruments and contemporary American idioms in Nordoff-Robbins. Aigen (2001) noted that a major principle underlying the Nordoff-Robbins approach to music therapy is the belief that a musical style, rhythm, scale, harmony, mode, or idiom can, in and of itself, be a clinical intervention. He wrote: It is not as if there is an inherently non-musical experience which one is conveying through a particular musical form; rather, the musical form itself is the intervention (p. 16). Surely, this key concept was not exclusive to the piano. Like the piano keyboard, which moves horizontally (left to right or vice versa), the guitar can produce a chromatic scale upon any of one of its six strings. However, the guitar includes a vertical element, as well. In standard tuning, the vertical intervals of the open strings move in perfect fourths from the sixth to the third string. The interval from the third to the second string is a major third and a perfect fourth appears, once again, from the second to the first string. This three-dimensional matrix, as jazz guitarist Pat Martino (personal communication, May 15, 2004), has depicted the guitar fingerboard, produces its characteristic geometric chord shapes and multi-string melodic patterns. The guitar's distinctive timbre, produced by the direct action of fingers or guitar pick on the strings, responds to light touches, as well as a vibrant, percussive approach which can generate complex rhythms. Its strumming, finger picking, and single-string approaches may incorporate expressive techniques unique to string instruments such as vibrato, rapid picking tremolo effects, bending of notes, the use of harmonics, and altering tone quality by the style of picking. A guitarist can also utilize various alternate tunings which produce rich, modal harmonies. Finally, the guitar's portable size allows for freedom of movement and, often, closer proximity to the client than the piano. These qualities of guitar can lead to vastly different musical and clinical decisions than the piano. …