Finally, the letter arrived.
I ripped open the envelope.
"We are happy to inform you that you have been accepted..........."
As I stared at those words, I knew that my life was about to change.
My journey as musician was to begin. But before the journey could begin, I had to get through summer.
What was I to do to pass the time? I decided to try to get some kind of job, which wasn't going to be easy since I had just finished high school and had no qualifications.
I tried a long shot. I asked someone I knew who was the head psychiatrist at an institution not far from where I lived, if she thought that there was a possibility for me to get a job there as some kind of "music therapist". Luckily for me, she was open to putting me on as an "experiment", although I was very young and had no formal training. "What will you do?" she asked then continued "do you have a plan?" "I will endeavor to reach people with the help of music, I will use music as a tool to communicate with the patients you assign to me" I answered. She wrote down some names on a piece of paper and handed it to me. "The wards are written next to their names, so go to the wards, ask for the head nurses and they will take you to the patients I have assigned, good luck" and with those words our meeting was over. I stepped out of her office and into the bright sunlight. What I didn't know at that stage was how incredibly challenging, scary and confronting the next three months was going to be.
The next morning, armed with a number of vinyl records, cassette tapes and a bunch of percussion instruments, I went to the ward D to meet my first patient. A large woman, dressed in a pale blue nurse's uniform greeted me with a few polite words, a smirk on her face and then took me to meet my "student". Standing in front of a steel-enforced white door, she pulled out a key, unlocked the door, and then walked away. Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkened room and I could see, what I saw sent shivers up and down my spine. In the middle of the room was a cage, barely big enough for a dog, even less so for a human being, but in the middle of that cage, there was a boy barely a teenager sitting in a hunched up position, rocking back and forth. Suddenly the half-closed door to the room flung fully opened and another nurse entered the room with another key in her hand. She walked over to the cage, unlocked a padlock, pulled the boy by one arm and dragged him whimpering out of the cage. I was speechless.
"Here" she said " is your student". Student? I looked at the boy squatting on the floor, covered in filth and rocking back and forth. "Oh, by the way, he can't walk properly so he crawls on all fours" said the nurse. "No wonder" I thought, the cage was so low that even if he had wanted to stand up, or walk, it wouldn't have been possible. The nurse dragged the boy to the "recreation room", I followed, and once we were both inside the room, the nurse said "good luck, and.. by the way, watch out, sometimes he lashes out and that's why we keep him in the cage". She left, closed the door behind her then locked it. Student 1. John.
Student 2. His name was Bernie and he had been a patient at the institution for most of his life. He suffered with "water on the brain" aka Hydrocephalus and was confined to a wheelchair. He hardly ever spoke but often smiled and seemed to enjoy listening to music.
Student 3. A 13 year old androgynous boy, well, he viewed himself as a boy. He called himself Eric and was full of mischief and joy.
Student 4. Another teenager, Sam, suffering with severe autism. Never spoke, avoided all eye contact, even with his parents who visited him everyday the first 10 years of his life, then less and less, and when I met him, his parents had not been to visit him in 6 years.
Student 5. "Sugartop". The first time I met Sugartop was very confronting. Sugartop had no arms, no legs, just a torso and a head, a head shaped like a sugartop and without a skull to protect his brain. But, he could hear, and he could see, so I was told.
Student 6. Theodora. A young, vivacious girl about 14 years old. She was brought to the institution as a mere baby by someone who had found her wrapped in newspaper on the steps of a church in a small Greek village. No one in the village wanted anything to do with her, so the Swedish couple who had found her, brought her to Sweden and handed her over to the institution. At the institution they established that she had a rare form of iodine deficiency that had affected her intellect, but she was still able to do many things and she loved music.
On the way home that first day, having been introduced to my students, I cried. I was angry, bewildered, confused, sad, and felt that I was totally out of my depth. But I knew one thing; music is a universal language that needs no words, it can heal, it can comfort, and it can build a bridge between hearts.
During my third "lesson" with John (student 1.), he suddenly shot up from the floor, stood up and pulled everything off the shelves in the recreation room. Screaming, he went on a "smashing everything" rampage and then, seemingly out of nowhere, he suddenly grabbed my hair. John pulled my hair so hard it brought tears to my eyes but something inside of me told me to not retaliate, rather, to stay absolutely still.
Staying absolutely still, strangely calmed John, he stopped pulling, and slowly he began to loosen his grip of my hair. Finally he let go altogether and sat down on the floor next to me. In hindsight, what I did next may seem a bit cheesy, but it brought about a change in John that I would never have anticipated, I said; "John, even if you destroy every thing in this room, you can't destroy the love I feel for you". I had no idea if he understood me since he never spoke, but from that moment on, all our music lessons were peaceful ones.....
Bernie, student 2. was a delight to be with although he never spoke either, but he would shake a maraca, hum along with the music, and dance as best he could in his wheelchair. During my last lesson with Bernie, in the middle of listening to Janis Joplin, he suddenly wheeled his chair really close to me and whispered: "Everyone in here thinks that I can't speak and that I don't understand much, but I do, I only pretend that I don't because if they knew just how much I understand of everything, they would move me somewhere else, and I don't want that, this is my home."
Eric, student 3. learnt to play the recorder, shake the maracas in time and "dance", well, what he called dancing anyway.
Student 4. Sam....now, what happened with him is almost unbelievable although with the information and knowledge we have today about autism, perhaps not so much. What I discovered during my lessons with Sam was that he was a "savant", a musical genius. While listening to Dvorak's "New World Symphony" I asked Sam if he could sing along with the viola part, and without any hesitation he did, and the reason that I know that he did so correctly is that I had the music score in my hand.
Student 5. Sugartop. I still have flashback of him laying in his bed, like a babe in swaddling. I have no idea if the music I played for him ever connected, but I hope so.
Student 6. The lovely Theodora. She used to whiz around the grounds at the institution on her bicycle, ringing her bell, laughing and singing. In the big hall where they used to show movies every Friday night, they had an upright piano that I used when I taught Theodora. I would play all sorts of pieces, classical, blues, jazz, and she would ride her bike around and around in the hall while I was playing, shrieking with delight. One day I called her over to the piano and asked her: "Do you want to hear angels?"
"Yes, yes, play angels" she answered. If you press and hold the sustain pedal on a piano and quickly pull your hands back and forth over the black keys, it sounds (with imagination) like "angels" to some of us. Theodora watched for a minute as I played "angels" then resolutely she jumped back on her bicycle and off she went again while shouting: "More, more, play more angels!!" From then on, angels was all she wanted me to play.
I spent three months at Carlslund (the name of the institution) and what I experienced there made a huge impact on me. By the time it was time for me to start music school, I had caught a glimpse of just how powerful a form of communication music can be.
"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent".
(Victor Hugo)
Ps: this story may seem fantastical and untrue, but I can assure you, it is true.
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