There’s More to Music Therapy Than Just Being Therapeutic
As a music therapist, I have been bombarded for years with the question, “What is music therapy?” And after my typical 30-second speech, the other person often replies with something like, “I do that all the time, when I play music when I clean or when I rock out to...
Music Therapist Highlight: Lucy Schipper
Lucy is a 1999 graduate of the University of Iowa with a Bachelors degree in Music Therapy. She received certification in Neurologic Music Therapy in 2007, maintains board certification, and is a member of both the American Music Therapy Association and the Iowa...
Help Spread the Word of Music Therapy!
We need your help! Whether you have experienced music therapy first-hand, or you are a parent of a healthy, normally-developing child who took music lessons, or perhaps you yourself took music lessons as a child or as an adult, you have seen and/or experienced the...
Jenny’s Recommendations – Music Therapy Awareness Week
We're proud to announce our participation in Music Therapy Awareness Week February 27 to March 2, 2012. Music Therapy Awareness Week is intended to help educate the public how music therapy can benefit individuals in a wide variety of circumstances or settings. We'll...
Emilia’s Recommendations – Music Therapy Awareness Week
We're proud to announce our participation in Music Therapy Awareness Week February 27 to March 2, 2012. Music Therapy Awareness Week is intended to help educate the public how music therapy can benefit individuals in a wide variety of circumstances or settings. We'll...
You Are My Sunshine, Who brings a little sunshine to your life?
This morning, while singing “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine you make me happy when skies are gray…” I began to really think about the words of the song and in turn asked my hospice patient who brings (or has brought) them a little sunshine no matter the...
The True Meaning of Music Therapy
Music therapists spend most of their time explaining, demonstrating, and defining music therapy, which I have done in community presentations twice this week. We often fight the pre-conceived notion that we are just plastering a "therapy" label on an entertainment...
The Scary Music Therapy World of Hospice
As a practicum student my academic advisor drilled into students' minds the importance of a session plan. And as students, we greatly needed those session plans. We not only needed, but we DEPENDED on those session plans. If we happened to forget the flow of our plan...
Why I Love My iPhone
Let me preface this blog by saying as of April 30th I was SO anti-smartphone. I did not understand why I needed this fancy thing, when I knew it would just break and cause me many headaches. I know I sound like I’m ancient, and most 25 year olds have a smartphone of...
Thinking On Your Feet
Recently I arrived to a session my usual 10 minutes early. I like to be early not only to have set up time, but to have allowed myself time in case of traffic jams or any other unforeseeable hang-ups that might cause me to be late to a session. As I unloaded my...
Creative Juice
This summer has been so much fun, because I have been learning about creativity! It’s been refreshing! What makes us creative? What makes our creativity stagnate? How can we spark new creativity? Challenging ourselves to try new things is great for our brains. I’ve...
Two of Us Had Tears in Our Eyes….
A hospice patient with Parkinson’s and accompanying confusion is rocking back and forth in his bed when I enter his room in a care facility. At his side an aide is trying to keep him from falling out of bed saying, “No, you’ve got to stay in bed”. He explains the...