Erin Spring, an Ohio University alumna and board-certified music therapist, emphasizes the importance of using music therapy to heal.
Spring plays guitar to a hospice patient. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales
A hospital patient with an aggressive brain tumor writhes in pain, shaking uncontrollably and gripping his son and daughter’s hands. The doctors and nurses have tried everything to calm his agitation, but to no avail. For a brief moment, the patient’s suffering seems endless.
Enter Erin Spring, a board-certified music therapist (MT-BC), who deftly whips out her guitar and starts to play the patient’s favorite country tunes by Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, matching her playing speed to the rhythm of the patient’s agitation. Spring strums and sings until the patient starts to loosen his grip on his children.
The patient begins to visibly relax while Spring matches his energy. Finally, he lies flat on the bed. His eyes are closed, and Spring’s gentle hum is the only thing keeping him calm. Experiences like this one, as told by Spring, are some of the ways that music therapy impacts lives.
According to Very Well Mind, music therapy is a profession in which music is used to confront physical, cognitive, social and emotional issues within a patient. Although it is traditionally associated with hospital patients, it can actually be used to help a wide variety of people.
“(Music therapy is) really about providing people with an opportunity to use the arts for healing and wellness and learning,” Spring says.
Spring, who became a certified music therapist in 2007, holds a bachelors and masters degree in music and music therapy from Ohio University. In 2010, she founded Central Ohio Music Therapy, LLC, a private practice for music therapy. She currently serves as the organization’s executive director and is also an adjunct professor and supervisor for music therapy at OU.
Although music therapy is still developing as a profession, the idea of healing with music has been around for centuries. According to the American Music Therapy Association website, “The 20th century profession formally began after World War I and World War II when community musicians of all types, both amateur and professional, went to Veterans’ hospitals around the country to play for the thousands of veterans suffering both physical and emotional trauma from the wars.”
Spring says that the state of Ohio is looking to start licensing art and music therapists in order to increase access to their services, because many education and healthcare providers must hold a state license in order to be hired as therapists and for their clients to access music therapy services. Although MT-BC is a national certification for music therapists, according to the Certification Board for Music Therapists website, in most states it is not enough. The state licensing for music therapy differs by state.
Spring says that they hope to have a bill re-introduced in the Ohio Senate with bipartisan sponsors minority leader Senator Kenny Yuko and Senator Andrew Brenner.
“We hope to have a companion bill introduced in the Ohio House, as well, this year,” she says. While there is no typical day-to-day routine of a music therapist, Spring says that she has been able to work with all age groups over the years, including hospice and neuro patients, elders and children. She also helps coordinate a children’s music therapy program at the Athens Library called “Sprouting Melodies.”
At OU, students studying music therapy gain experience by working with this same variety of people. Lucy Tschetter-Gaus, a sophomore at OU studying music therapy, says she discovered music therapy while volunteering at a clinic near her home in Roswell, Georgia, and pursued her passion for it at OU.
“I think it’s really cool, because I think music therapy hasn't even reached its peak in discoveries yet, and to be in the major while it's kind of still developing and the public is getting to know more and more about it and how effective it is, it’s really cool,” Tschetter-Gaus says. “But obviously there are parts of the brain that can't be reached through physical rehabilitation.”
She is currently working with older adults from 80 to 90 for her practicum, trying to touch on physical and cognitive domains as well as practicing receptive music listening for relaxation.
“Some common goals we have are (to) increase or maintain movement or increase (or) maintain relaxation (and) increase socialization since they haven't had a ton of visitors with COVID,” Tschetter-Gaus says. “A big one that we try to work on is socializing them with each other and with us.”
Due to the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic in the last year, many people have been left isolated in their homes. They have been away from experiences that bring them joy.
The preforming arts industry has taken a major financial hit, because concerts, performances and exhibits have been canceled or postponed. Despite not reaching every patient in-person this year, Spring says that music therapists rose to the occasion by bringing music therapy to patients virtually.
“We, as a profession, you know, some of us had done some virtual telehealth before, but it wasn't a terribly common practice and doing music therapy via virtual is a challenge because of the timing,” Spring says. “But a lot of music therapists really jumped in and said ‘Okay, we have to figure this out,’ because all of a sudden so many of our clients are isolated and they're under stimulated and not able to socialize when they're having their whole world turned upside down like the rest of us.”
Despite the challenges of shifting music therapy to a virtual platform to reach certain patients, Spring is pleased with how much outreach virtual music therapy has been able to achieve.
“Music therapists really, I think, jumped in and met the challenge really well and innovated and provided so many virtual services to reach so many people and really now we can reach even more than we did before,” she says.
Spring believes that the pandemic highlighted the importance of the arts.
“I think one thing that the pandemic has really shown us is that music is really just so universal and so vital to our lives,” she says. “It's not just a luxury, the music and the arts, we need them just as much as we need so many other things.”
One important principle in music therapy is the iso-principle, which is a term coined in 1948 by Ira Altshulter that defines the method of mood management Spring used to deescalate the brain tumor patient’s agitation.
According to Music Therapy Time, a blog by Erin Seibert, MT-BC, the iso-principle plays a large role in
Spring often plays music that is familiar to the the profession.
patient. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales.
“Everything in music therapy is about iso-principle,” Seibert writes. “You cannot connect to someone in an effective way without connecting to them emotionally, which also affects mentality and spirituality; or physiologically, which affects physicality. Engaging with others and mirroring their affect or emotional state is the most important way you can build rapport, garner trust, and more quickly connect to someone in music therapy.”
Mood can play a role in the types of music people gravitate toward. Spring says that while people tend to naturally gravitate toward music that matches our mood, it is important to let ourselves feel any low emotions we have and then be able move out of that state later. Tschetter-Gaus says that listening to sad music while sad can actually help an individual in the long run.
“If you listen to happy music, then you're trying to suppress emotion, (but) if you can just listen to a sad song and feel sad you feel like this sense of relief because you're just experiencing the emotion full out,” Tschetter-Gaus says.
Spring also says listening to sad music when sad oftentimes feels more correct than trying to forcefully engage in a happier activity.
“Being able to listen to music that reflects how we're feeling, it can help us kind of get through that because music generally is an enjoyable thing, even if it is sad music,” Spring says. “And it gives us an opportunity to really, I think, sometimes feel our emotions more deeply and process them.”
Originally published in Backdrop magazine, Spring 2021.
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