Music Therapy Clinician: Supporting reflective clinical practice Volume 1 | Page 31

help. Am I still breaking up?
Alright.] It sounds as if for you,
Christine, and, as I was saying, for
you, to some extent, Angela, for
you guys it was more…um,
intimately connected to music
therapy in the sense that your…it
was actually a part of the therapy
process, in effect, to take part in
this choir or to take part in a
performance. Am I hearing that
properly? Let me start, actually, by
asking you, Angela, because it
sounds as if it was more a part of,
you know…partly expected and
partly not. Because, I mean, you
also work with kids.

Angela: Yeah, we work with
some young adults too. We work
primarily with children, but what
we had that was wonderful was:
we are very close to Montclair State
University. So we got support from
the Music Therapy Club, had a
variety of performers, children and
adults, and it wasn’t necessarily
linked to part of the therapy
process; however, if someone felt
that they wanted to come and
perform or just needed to come and
watch a few times before they had
the nerve to get up and perform they had the courage to do that that would be great too. So we
always made sure that we had
enough people ahead of time to get
up to perform in case everyone was
shy that night. We often did run
into the problem where no one
wanted to go first. And…okay, that
was okay. Um, but, yeah, I think we
are rooted in the community, we
are close to the university, so I
think that we have that going for
us. I mean we do have to put effort
into advertising, so through social
media,
through
the
community…um, but it really did
come together very well.

Roia: [laughing] I have to laugh
about social media, because when
we started I don’t even think
we…we may, possibly, have had
personal computers. Back in 1995 it
wasn’t quite as regular as it is now
where people are, like, oh yeah! We

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Designed by Amy Nemirow
just advertise. It’s no problem. I
mean,
we
actually
put
advertisements in the newspapers the local newspapers.

Angela: Isn’t this interesting,

though, because with social media,
there’s so many ways to advertise,
and there’s so much going on. So,
one of ours, we had a lower
turnout, but we think it was
because of the weekend, because
there were so many other
community events, professional
events, going on that we think we
had a lower turnout.

Roia:

Yeah. Um, go ahead,
Christine, you wanted to say
something.

Christine: [Laughing] I was
just sort of remembering how
technology has changed. You
know, when we first started the
chorale I was making practice
tapes,
recording
the
accompaniment,
singing
the
specific voice part on cassette tapes
[laughter]. And then I had to learn
how to use a digital recorder and
actually make CDs. And how much

more exposure we were able to get
when YouTube became popular,
because we were able to post
performances on YouTube, and
suddenly we, you know, got
[recording is garbled] viewed
beyond the Philadelphia area.

Roia: Suddenly you got what in
the Philadelphia area?

Christine:

We got viewed
beyond the immediate area,
because people were sharing that
link with friends and family…[audio
garbled]…It actually increased our
exposure, you know, exponentially.
And what was interesting was that
we had…[audio garbled]…enough
information about who the group
was and why it existed and…that I
began to get inquiries from, like,
high school choral teachers who
were looking for how best to
feature and support and include
singers with intellectual disabi