Music and the Expressive Arts
Markus Scott-Alexander, Linda Worster, Aisha Radwan
This article is based on a partial transcription from an online workshop presented through Expressive Arts without Borders on May 9, 2023. It includes a discussion with Markus Scott-Alexander PhD, REAT, Founder and Director of Expressive Arts Without Borders, Linda Worster, singer-songwriter, and Aisha Radwan, Director of Expressive Arts Egypt.
Markus: I have found that we can relax into what precedes our ideas of how to be helpful, which often are not sustainable. It is not so much what it is that we can do, but what there is that nourishes in the space between ourselves and others. I have found that we open to qualities of awareness in this space, and music is one manifestation of these qualities.
I often say that English is not my first language. Instead, first I know something viscerally. There is some movement in me, some awareness. There is something perhaps that’s true, and I find the language to articulate what it is. As I look at what I know in my heart, for example, I’m not thinking in English as much as I’m translating in English. Rather, I’m thinking about what I know in a way that feels sensual and musical. There are bass notes and other notes that are all happening at the same time as what is happening in my belly. I hear you and my heart opens.
All of these movements are like an orchestra. Each of us is like an orchestra. To communicate that only in the language of our accustomed self is not enough for many of us, however.
Such is the case with Linda Worster, for example, who found a whole other scope for language. Since Linda is also a lyricist, she has been able to combine music and words to discover if what she was knowing in her heart could come out into the world as song.
In a sense then, Linda, it seems a wisdom path that you’ve been on. You have pursued a life with music in order to cultivate your language, to build the skills that activate your inherent wisdom and shape it in song. Is that how you have experienced it?
Linda: As I went along, I think my music was a distillation of all the various things that I was reading and studying. There have been many influences that have gone into my music, like great song-writing teachers and the inspiration I found in all that I was reading about spirituality as well as a wide range of other topics.
That still is true, but I draw more from experience now than I did in the past.
Markus: Aisha has created a structure for us to crystallize the heart of the question of what is music. Then we will look at how music weaves its way into the work of expressive arts therapy. We get to be aware of what is around us and all that contributes to music-making. Together we will take care of the balance that comes from tapping into what is moving within us and creating openings between us.
Aisha: I would like to start with what you mean when you say there is music in everything.
Markus: At some point I realized that not everyone has cultivated the sensitivity of response. The phrase in expressive arts is low skill, high sensitivity. We are to be sensitive to what makes us human. How will I respond to the profound nurture that has its own tone and rhythm? How does it change me? How will I respond to the static that is present in what I sense? How am I different walking down the street in the city and going for a walk on the beach?
I hear with my body. I sense the tone. The tone of the beach is different from the tone of the city. It is a different music, and my body registers that. That is my work with music. One of the things we talk about in expressive arts is expanding the play range. I have my biases within the range, but I really want to take care of my full musical range. On a practical level, that means to sense the music wherever I am and how it is impacting me and then be with how to respond to that music.
Aisha: What is the role of response in that sense of music?
Markus: It goes back to intimacy. Linda Worster’s music, for example, has so much intimacy in it from her being in her heart that it is healing. In delicate response to that intimacy, my nervous system relaxes; it feels healthy. On the other hand, when I react, my nervous system tightens and it is jarring.
In a larger context my question becomes how to respond rather than react. It is for me to take responsibility for how I am within the incredible range of response that is possible. We get to appreciate the range in music, for example, from the loud drums to the delicate flute. In appreciating it, we grow within the phenomenon of response. How you respond to the drums makes you who you are. How you respond to the flute makes you who you are. The drums don’t make you who you are and the flute doesn’t make you who you are. It is how you respond. What moves it into therapy is learning how to bring response to the range of what life offers you. How can I respond to a scream or a siren or tears?
Aisha: How do you use this sense of music in a therapeutic way that helps us in our response to challenges or the world around us?
Markus: The beauty of expressive arts therapy is that it is not about techniques. It is about the delicate skill of how to be with a particular person on a particular day. It is how we step into our time together with as much sensitivity as we are capable of.
I listen to the client but, more importantly, I sense the moment, and there is music in the air. It’s either ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba in the air, or mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm. Something is in the air that helps me to sense how to share the moment and to be in it intimately. It’s wonderful to sense the music of the spheres and have cosmic consciousness, but my work, while it includes that, is mostly about the tiniest, most delicate point of truly meeting. It’s not that you are planning to make music with your client. You might, but not as a technique to be helpful. Rather, music is a way to flesh out the actuality of truly meeting. It is not only about meeting between the two of you, but fostering the other person actually meeting their own heart or meeting their own soul.
How to engage in that meeting? One of the ways is to move it. That movement can imply sound and the possibility of music. Expressive arts work is a delicate process that is incredibly intimate, and music is one of the ways that we can track the unfolding of the intimacy of the moment. Music literally tracks the quality of the unfolding. Even if it is simply in the subtlety of breath, we make music in sensing its rhythm.
Aisha: What do you mean by seeing the music? How can music be visual and kinesthetic as well as auditory?
Markus: When you asked that, I went immediately to my wife and me having a couple of friends for dinner. I watch me in the kitchen having a really good time cooking and seeing what ends up on the plates. I can feel the music moving me… la, la, la, la, la, do, do, do, do, do. I can see the colors, the textures in what is in front of me. I can see the delight of the music of the dance of cooking. I can see that the delight of the music of the dance shows up in the food. I can sense what is filling the air: rhythm, rhythm, rhythm, beats, ba, ba. It is a delightful, playful time.
So, our relationship with music within the frame of expressive arts is not just auditory. We can see in our lives how this music of our lives is showing up. We can sense in our bodies whether there is silence or the lone piccolo or the big mama drum. We can sense it. We can see it. We can experience it kinesthetically.
The music doesn’t only fill us; it somehow holds us. I felt held by the joy. Having spent many years learning what aesthetic analysis is, my time in the kitchen is a kind of aesthetic analysis of what that specific joy is like. I didn’t realize there were violins, too. I like cooking for people, I get inspired, and I was surprised to find the strings were there, too! Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm. The music shows up in my body from the inside out and it fills the room so when our guests arrived I didn’t have to put on music. Instead, just…“Hello. Sit down. Can I get you something to drink?” It was a lovely evening.
Aisha: How to enrich these qualities that are in every one of us? How to really embody the qualities of the kinesthetic, the visual, and the auditory? How to embody the effects of the music in mind, body and heart?
Markus: In regard to theory, the larger question is how can our theory inform our practice? What is it we can actually do with people to wake up their bodies, refine their ability to hear, and help them to enjoy the delicacy of response to the moment? We can look at some basic theories, but each of you, either for yourselves or for the people you work with, will stay with the question of how to work with people to help them sense the music coming out of them.
I often think about pre-cultural power. Certainly, part of Expressive Arts Without Borders is cross-cultural, but finding music within us can take us to a space that was before we were acculturated. Since some people are primarily visual, they may need to start with the visual. You have them create a painting and then ask if the painting could sing what would it sound like. If someone is kinesthetic, they might start with dance and slowly bring in music or the voice. They might create a dance and then a painting and then add their voice.
Helping someone strengthen their resonance with their range of expression is person specific. It requires a sense of how to support a particular person’s voice in a way that is first things first. It may take a little time exploring visual art first or spending some time moving in order to open a person to response. In this way, the intermodality of expressive arts is useful in helping people find their particular voice.
Aisha: As you have said before, it can be different on different days. Sometimes the music will get us out and sometimes it will take us in. It is about being sensitive to the moment for this person or myself and then sensitive to what is the right next.
Markus: Yes. Coming back to Linda, the range of your songs is huge. I remember you told me about a song that you wrote because somebody challenged you to write not one of those sweet Linda Worster songs, but to write a song where you’re pissed or something. You said it was so intense that you had to write another song in order to balance out for your body what it was like for you creating that song.
Linda: It was a challenge to write a scary song. He said don’t Linda Worsterize it. It is my tendency to come back to what is comfortable and positive. If I say something that is disturbing to me, by the third verse I make it better. I smooth it over and end up seeing it from a different point of view, but he was saying don’t do that.
When I write a song I have to sing it a lot of times and it would upset me every time I sang the scary song. Finally, I just wrote an antidote song, and I would play it after the upsetting song. Then the birds would sing with me and that would be great.
Markus: Music is not just something beautiful that you play for other people. Music is going on all the time and it takes many forms. It could be shouting or crying. For all of us, it could be the sound of our hearts beating.
Markus: In my own experience, crying as a child felt like being victimized by my own sensitivity. After some time, the act of crying became singing. I became quite a good singer and then I started crying less. I discovered I could shape the power of whatever was moving in me in this way.
Years later in my work in expressive arts I developed an approach I call ‘let go and shape’. It has proved to be an amazing phenomenon at the heart of the expressive arts work. You may have strong feelings and you let go into them. The heart is powerful and much of our training has to do with that ‘letting go’ into that power and building the skill to shape it. What also has become clear in that approach is not to let go and start to shape too soon.
We also are thinkers but I don’t think about what I think. I am reminded that one of my favourite Linda Worster songs is a fun, upbeat “Too Much Thinking”. Expressive arts work is not to be an intellectual discourse but rather an opening for us to be touched by the meaningfulness of our work. I would like our time together to be useful for you in some way and it doesn’t work if you’re not touched by something.
Giving thought to what we know matters in our hearts is the right use of intellect. Time together is not in order to think about what we think but rather to give thought to what we know. We may get to offer something truly useful like how to create safe frames for taking risks, or how to find safe ways that invite people into intimacy. There is a kindness in listening to the music. Music is one of the ways we can woo ourselves and others into the kindness available in that shared intimacy.
Sometimes noise is louder than the music. Our work then is to help a person attune to those things that are actually quieter so that they not listen only to the loudest voices of fear and anger. Those voices are there, but we also want to embrace the range, not drown out the flute. You need the drums, but sometimes you need to tell the drums to be quieter so that the flute can be heard.
Aisha: Some people, because they don’t know how to compose music, feel that they are not musical or that they cannot integrate music in their work. What is the difference between music and musical compositions?
Markus: One of the theories in science that affects my work is the Chaos Theory. The universe started out chaotically before it became a solar system; it didn’t start out as a system. It started out as a chaotic potential including the latent power of a self-organizing principle. There is vast movement in the universe and something is wanting to happen in the midst of all this movement. It self-organizes because of the phenomenon of the attractor. In the midst of this chaotic movement, form will be drawn to an attractor, much like the sun is an attractor for the planets that revolve around it.
Similarly in music, I sense there is always something ready to happen, a quality of “on the way”. Something is always on the way. When you work with this quality, at some point you find something is moving toward manifestation, like a song. You sense there is movement, and the self-organizing principle is active in what is moving. At that moment you are the attractor. There is music out there or music in here and your heart is saying, “Okay I’m listening”. You are consciously participating, and that is what makes a composition, but the music is already there.
The universe is not silent. Your heart is not silent just because you don’t hear it. It is in that shift from the music to participating with that music that has the potential to move it into musical composition.
Linda: Yes, that is what happens for me. I’ll sit and it is like fishing. I throw out my line and I wait. Maybe I’ll noodle around on the guitar and hope that by grace some seed of a song will be given to me to start the song. I keep listening and I keep playing and then it slowly congeals around that. A lot of times I have no idea where the song is going to end up from where it starts. It is a process of discovery.
Markus: The word ‘servant’ comes to mind.
Linda: Yes. In the studio when musicians are recording a song, we are there to serve the music. We say to leave your ego at the door because you know you are there to serve the music.
Markus: So, in the difference between music and musical composition, there is a shift. The music exists and when you are serving the music there is the possibility of something new coming, a composition that you co-create. You work with the music to create a composition. Everything can be a co-creation.
Linda: It remains a totally miraculous and mysterious process, even after doing it for over fifty years.
Markus: Expressive arts therapy is always in a rhythm of making art and making sense. People come to us to make sense of their lives. They want to make sense of how to respond to their difficulties and how to access what nurtures them to help them move through the difficult times. We give thought to that which nurtures. We make art and we make sense. That is the right use of intellect.
It is powerful for us to get together and give thought to what we know in our hearts. To express it is potentially transforming. Our responsibility is to develop the skill to create safe frames for this powerful work.
At some point I decided to stay with the question, “What am I doing and how does it work?” Then I recognized that I like using my intellect. I like thinking about what I love. One of the things that I love is for us to be together. Sometimes the emphasis can be a more on the intellect than on working with our bodies and our playfulness, but it behooves us to reclaim the beauty of the right use of intellect and think about what we love. We get to ask ourselves then how we can be even more with what we love.
So what is the phenomenon we call music? I am able to explore what music is through the rhythm and flow of being taken by it.
Music lives and moves. Music in everything allows the movement to flow.
Music literally tracks the unfolding of the moment.
Music is life in process. Music is the language of being alive.
Music is omnipresent.
Music is feeling everything around you.
Music is intimacy and deep connection with the self and the world.
Music is within us, between us and all around us.
Music is in my heart and it allows me to hear the music in yours and the world around us.
Music connects. Music is a thread of connection.
Music connects us without words. Music is our common language.
Music is you, me, and we.
Music is an expression of a soul. Music feeds my soul when I am open to it. Music is flight to my soul of what deep down I know is me.
Music is the song in my heart that is sparked when human beings connect from their souls.
Music starts from the heart or what precedes the heart and travels through to the outside world.
Music creates a path where we cannot see one.
Music creates a journey, taking us somewhere we may or may not have been before.
Music is physical.
Music is giving movement and voice to sensory rhythms.
Music can speak for you.
Music is flowing through me, living in my cells, vibrating in my cells.
Music is touch without physical touching.
Music is the language of intuition.
Music is our connection to joy.
I am convinced that the quality of intimacy that we have with the movement in our hearts and being able to respond to that delicate movement is the springboard to any kind of artmaking. Our focus here is music but in expressive arts we work intermodally.
Beauty is powerful. Art-making is about shaping beauty and being shaped by beauty. It behooves us to become well trained to help people to shape their power, particularly the beauty that is them. I often think of expressive arts as a wisdom path. How beautiful it is to see and hear so much expression of wisdom.
Every time you sing a song, Linda, it is different. Creating a song is one art form but sharing it is a whole other art form. It is the same thing in the frame of the expressive arts. It is an intermodal shift. You are shifting from one modality to explore music, then to create music, and then to share it. With some people, our work is to help them to come out and share it, while with other clients we help them to come back and they don’t have to share it. The beauty of the music is that it is very good at both. Music helps us to come back and spend some time and then if we wish, it becomes a vehicle for coming out.
I love the fact that you have spent your whole life as a musician, Linda. You haven’t tried doing something else. That represents a lifetime of coming back to that source, and there is a generosity of spirit in you that you clearly enjoy sharing. You consistently demonstrate taking care of what is within us and taking care of our capacity to share it. That is the spirit that I also love about Expressive Arts Without Borders so your presence in all of our work becomes emblematic of what we value.
Linda: I am continually grateful and touched that I get to do music. I get to play music, to make music, and it truly does erase the separation between us. I look around and see all the faces on Zoom and I feel bonded with them. I feel we are truly connected. That connection is thrilling to me and it is music that does it so effectively. Music is reliable. It really is a universal language. I have played music with people who don’t speak English and I don’t speak whatever language they speak, but we play music together and we understand each other perfectly. What a joy.
Markus: And I can say that you also spend time in the liminal space. That is our work also. When we are not exploring those deep places of music within or sharing it, we spend a lot of time in the liminal space of ‘on the way’. That is where expressive arts therapy becomes essential.
When we are in our everyday life, we need to get out of bed, we need to walk the dog, take out the garbage, go food shopping. We get to see how our capacity to move in the extraordinary of art-making lands in the ordinary, and the how the ordinary can be transformed into something quite unordinary because of the way we move in the ordinary.
One’s love of taking walks in the woods, in nature, is an arena in which to become inspired, not necessarily to build skill but just to hear the music. The connection to arts-based ecotherapy or nature-based expressive arts offers another such arena in which to become inspired, to hear the music. We get to hang out in that liminal space of letting go of things and beginning to embrace new things, and in the inspirational space between. I want to emphasize how important it is in the therapeutic process that it is not always about doing something in order to become healthy. Just being in your walks in the woods makes it possible for there to be an infilling of inspiration and the use of your skill.
Wouldn’t you say, Linda, that the liminal space which you often find in the woods is essential for you as a singer-songwriter?
Linda: Absolutely. I go to a place where I am not doing and I am not thinking. It is not about trying to grasp something. It is only about being, allowing being. As I can do that, as I can be that, the music flows out of that.
Markus: Thanks to you all for taking the time to remember that we need a balanced life. Our solitude is essential but so is community. Thank you for bringing your beauty to our time together. We are a lovely band of players.
Note:
Markus: My hope is that you, the reader, finds something here that touches you, that you find useful, and that it proves to be relevant to you in your life and perhaps in your work.
( From the online workshop June 15, 2023)