Veterans Day

The community band played for the Veterans Day ceremony in Taylor Park in Orange this morning and it went well. For me, the band's playing for this event each year, and on Memorial Day, has more significance than regular concerts. For the people attending these ceremonies, the music we play has real meaning and serves a definite purpose. It's as much music therapy as my one-to-one hospice volunteering, just on a larger scale.

Consensus Reality

As I start writing posts in my head before typing them out, I've several times realized that there was some groundwork that needed laying before getting that specific. For one thing, while I think I have a fair grasp of consensus reality, it's not always where I start from.

When I was a boy back in the 1950's, geologists believed the Earth was just a big rock whose surface had never changed. To my eye the west coast of Africa and the east coast of South America looked like puzzle parts pulled apart and I wondered how anyone could be so sure of what went on way back before people existed. Then in the 1960's "plate tectonics" was a phrase you'd see, and all of a sudden, what seemed obvious to any child's eye was hailed as a great scientific advance.  

Consensus reality is what's accepted by the majority of people as the way things really are, but that doesn't mean they're always right. When I started out as a Registered Music Therapist, the notion of music therapy was not generally accepted as a "real" therapy. To me it was like people not seeing the connection between South America and Africa.

Registered Music Therapist

While working as an attendant and group leader on locked psychiatric wards during my 20's, I became aware of music therapy and went back college (Shenandoah University) to get a B.A. in Music Therapy in 1980. After an internship at San Antonio State Hospital I became a Registered Music Therapist. That credential allowed me to work with emotionally disturbed students in the South San Antonio I.S.D., and that was the largest segment of my private practice in San Antonio as a music therapist from 1980 until 1993. Since then the credential has evolved into something requiring certification, testing, and regular inservice training. 

I went into the field in part because of the opportunity to be something of a pioneer. But it could be that I'm just an outlier. While there's an absolute need for a professional organization, when I read over the literature and the training options, a lot of what I see as possible in music therapy is not addressed. This blog is to look at some of those other forms music therapy might take, as well as being a compendium of various resources that might be helpful to folks interested in music therapy and/or simply wanting to advance their music making skills and opportunities.

So the url for this site, "registeredmusictherapist.com", was chosen because that was the credential I worked so hard to get and is still how I self-identify. It's also to make clear that other than being a member of the AMTA, I have very little involvement with the professional music therapy establishment. In 2020 the credential RMT will be eliminated.