“Beginning with her first book… Picoult has refused to sweat the small stuff. She’s concerned with love and truth, the blurry boundary lines implied by both. She forces the reader to look, however uncomfortable the experience might be, at complacent people who discover, much too late, the sad disparity between what they thought they knew and what they know now.” - Orlando Sentinel Tribune
suggestions about what it means to age well, and used their comments as a springboard for discussion. Another who was working in a school with teenagers put on music and had them start drawing a picture based on what the music sounded like to them. Then after 30 seconds, they passed the picture to someone else, so collectively they wound up creating one image and could talk as a group about how it evolved.
The most moving moments for me, though, occurred at a burn hospital in Boston. I shadowed another therapist as she moved through her workday, which consisted of using music to help reduce pain. Our first patient was a two-year-old from Central America with burns over 70% of his body. As they changed the little boy’s dressing, the therapist sang Spanish lullabies. “Escucho la musica!” she’d say whenever he began to cry. And as she started playing again, his heart rate monitor would slow. What struck me the most was that music therapy allowed other health professionals to do their jobs more easily. While the nurses were focused on the medical activity, the music therapist was the one focused solely on the emotions of the child.
“With a strong, topical theme, Picoult gets into the heads of her well-developed characters.” – The Daily Telegraph (Sydney Australia)
Our next patient was a 15-year-old who had fallen into a bonfire and burned 84% of her. Her family had said she liked music, but they’d been playing New Age stuff. Through trial and error, the therapist discovered that the girl preferred goth music. She shook uncontrollably as her dressing was changed, while the therapist sang Radiohead. The whole time, the girl stared hard at the therapist, as if she needed that connection just to get through what was being done to her. As we left, the girl spoke for the first time since we’d come. She said, “It was nice to hear your voice.”
Music therapy, to me, is music performance without the ego. It’s not about entertainment as much as it’s about empathizing. If you can use music to slip past the pain and gather insight into the workings of someone else’s mind, you can begin to fix a problem.
“Picoult is known for writing fictional page-turners that address controversial issues.” – Washington Post