Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Healing Through Music

SOUND: FADE UP AND UNDER MEETING VAN NAMEN AT THE DOOR

TALI SINGER: One of the first things you notice about Marion van Namen’s house is that she has a lot of instruments. A lot.

MARION VAN NAMEN: I did count them once. I have over 50. This is a song that I play with three different instruments. I have an ocean drum. It sounds also like a rain stick, but I have it in the form of an ocean drum. That is the rain. (SOUND: OCEAN DRUM) Then I have some wind chimes. That is the wind. (SOUND: WIND CHIMES) Then I also have a bourdoon lyre. It’s almost like a miniature harp. (SOUND: LYRE) The strings are tuned in a chord. That is the sun.

SOUND: SONG (RAIN IS FALLING…)

MARION VAN NAMEN: I always feel, there’s the magical seconds after the song where I preserve the silence, because that’s I think when the music comes in at a deeper level. And they can also hear—inwardly, they can still hear the music, even though physically it’s gone. And that’s, I believe, where a lot of the magic happens.

TALI SINGER: I can’t help but notice how great those instruments sound, especially when Van Namen tells me she made a lot of them herself.

MARION VAN NAMEN: Yeah, the wind chimes you just heard, I made. I’m also a cellist. I have, I must confess, five cellos, or variations on it. The therapeutic kind is called a krata. That is named after an old Celtic instrument called the krute. I have three of those. Then I have what I call a fairy fiddle, which is a very simple cello version. And it only has two strings. So it’s not too complicated for a five-year-old to play just one string at a time. Let me bring some flutes out.

SOUND: Copper flute

TALI SINGER: Van Namen grew up in the Netherlands, the third child in a very musical family.

MARION VAN NAMEN: My father played piano and organ. My mother played piano. Both my older sisters had piano lessons from my grandmother who I adored. So she really gave me the love for music. One of my sisters also played violin and we had little house concerts where we would perform. So music has always been there. I don’t remember a beginning of music coming into my life. When I was a teenager, I wanted a career in music but wasn’t sure how. My parents recommended to keep music as a hobby, but that kept popping up and wanting to come to the surface more.

TALI SINGER: It took awhile for her passion to resurface. In her twenties, van Namen worked in advertising in New York. Then she spent time volunteering in Tanzania.

MARION VAN NAMEN: In my thirties, one of my teachers recommended music therapy and that’s how I found out about it. And it struck a chord in me and it’s something I wanted to know more about.

MARION VAN NAMEN: Here, this instrument I want to show you is a pentatonic lyre. A pentatonic scale is a scale consisting of five notes.

SOUND: PENTATONIC SCALE

MARION VAN NAMEN: We may recognize it from Celtic music. Asian music has it, as well, like sakura. It’s a well-known Japanese folk song. And this is wonderful for children, 5, 6, 7, 8 years old. Nine.

SOUND: FADE UP AND UNDER LYRE

SOUND: FADE UP AND UNDER MEETING SCHROEDERS AT THE DOOR

TALI SINGER: Today, van Namen is visiting one of her clients: Logan Schroeder, a 17-year-old with autism. He’s been doing music therapy for nine years now, the last three of those with van Namen.

KIM SCHROEDER: When he went to this other school, we could never get him to go to the Christmas performances. He had a music teacher there, and every year, we couldn’t get him to go to the music performance, let alone get up and perform. But after a few years of music therapy, we were able to get him to the school, get him up onstage. And he went up there and he sang and participated. And a whole bunch of his teachers came up and they couldn’t believe he was up there, so that was pretty neat.

SOUND: FADE UP AND UNDER DRUMMING

TALI SINGER: After setting up, the two of them practice traditional African drumming together, along with Logan’s older sister Sammi, who joins them for the session.
When we met, I could tell Logan had trouble with eye contact. But when he’s drumming, it’s a totally different story. Occasionally he looks away. But most of the time, he’s intensely focused. His eyes are locked with van Namen’s. And he’s having fun.

SOUND: FADE UP DRUMMING WITH SILLY NOISE, THEN FADE UNDER

TALI SINGER: Logan raises his shoulders up and down to the beat. Sometimes, he closes his eyes and soaks up the rhythm.

SOUND: FADE UP AND UNDER DRUMMING

MARION VAN NAMEN: It’s interesting that we all have the experience of music making us want to dance or music making us cry. So we all experience the effects of music, and that’s the beauty of music therapy. It’s almost like you’re getting in touch with the mysteries.

SOUND: FADE UP AND UNDER MUSIC ON SULTRY

MARION VAN NAMEN: Every human being is unique. And every human being is a mystery. So how to meet that person with music is not always easy. Every now and then, I’ll have a client that I toss my hands up in the air and wonder how best to meet that person through music.

TALI SINGER: One of Van Namen’s success stories is an eight-year-old boy who was sexually abused. In the beginning she struggled with how to meet him.

MARION VAN NAMEN: And he was very disoriented. He was six when I started working with him. And very aggressive. Being in a room with him was even difficult, just getting him in the room. He would be so open and his energy would just pour out to everything he saw and he would grab everything. Instruments weren’t safe in the same room as him. Even he and I were not always safe. He had a phase in the beginning—his mother would also be in the room. He had a phase in the beginning where he would go through baby stages. He would cradle on his mother’s lap and we would sing lullabies. And sometimes that would capture his attention and sometimes it didn’t. And in the end what really captured him was storytelling, fairytales. And then I would embrace that with music, so there would be part of the fairy tale that I would turn into a song. There would be an opening and an ending song for the fairytale. Even to this day, two years later, he drinks the stories. He loves it.

SOUND: SONG WITH KRATA FOLLOWED BY A FEW SECONDS OF SILENCE

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