The pandemic changed everything, and now I am blogging...

To be honest, I have not known how to start these blog posts. I have lots of ideas to share with you but I have been finding it difficult to write my introduction. In my work, it is most important to first be “related”, to have a sense of where each of us comes from, to listen and be present to the other person so that when I communicate something I at least have a little bit of an idea of how it might be interpreted. The internet offers no such thing.

Being a music therapist, I am used to co-creating musical experiences with children. I get to use my decades of training in classical music, music composition and improvisation skills every day, for several hours a day composing and improvising with many little musicians. My work is never boring. Children are creative and have no concept of rules. They are the perfect foil to my perfectionist persona that threatens to label every song I write as “not good enough”. Over the years, I have written many songs, presented them to children and had those songs come out completely different at the end of the day. That is the joy of my work: experiencing the unexpected in collaboration with others. For me, this quarantine allows me time to further develop ideas that have remained on my shelf, but it also means that my main source of inspiration - children - are removed from my process where it all gets “kid tested”. Robert Munsch makes a point of not writing his stories down until he has told them several times. I have a similar rule. I therefore ask for your patience (and your feedback if you are willing) as I redesign my creative process to create music children will love during this time of quarantine.