With Healing Heritage Barcelona Publishers and editors Carol and Clive Robbins have given us an important historical document. Paul Nordoff has influenced generations of music therapists to this day, and will continue to do so, so to have access to some of this man’s ideas on music is significant for any clinician, teacher or researcher in our field. Until recently such access has been limited. Some ideas on music are of course communicated directly and indirectly in the books that Nordoff and Robbins wrote together, but these are rather fragmented, since the concern of the authors in these books has been to present the clinical work. A privileged few have had a photocopy of Nordoff’s “Talks on Music”, but Healing Heritage – which is based on “Talks on Music” – serves the function of making Nordoff’s thoughts on music accessible to the public.
.....Healing Heritage is an edited version of a series of lectures that Nordoff gave in 1974. The “Nordoff-Robbins Preliminary Training Course in Music Therapy” was arranged at the Goldie Leigh Hospital in London. Fifteen students participated in the course and formed an international group; seven of them came from the UK, the other eight came from Italy, Canada, Denmark, and Norway. In addition to these fifteen students, Professor Alfred Nieman of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, a composer and teacher of improvisation that influenced Mary Priestley’s work, also audited parts of the course and contributed to the discussions.
.....This course was one of the few comprehensive courses that Nordoff & Robbins taught, and many of the students of that course have influenced the development of modern music therapy, for example, in the UK, Jean Eisler, Jane Gibson, Rachel Verney (London NR training course), and Elaine Streeter (Anglia University music therapy training course). This is also the situation in the Nordic countries. Among the two Danish students was Merete Birkebæk who later became one of the Nordoff-Robbins teachers at the Herdecke mentor course in 1978-1980. Among the four Norwegian students were Unni Johns and Tom Næss, who, together with Even Ruud, started the music therapy education in Oslo in 1978, the first full time music therapy education in any of the Nordic countries.
.....In these 1974 lectures Paul Nordoff integrated his many years of experience as a pianist, composer and professor of music with his 15 years’ experience as a music therapist. Kenneth E. Bruscia writes in the Foreword to this book: “Healing Heritage is a carefully edited version of Paul Nordoff’s “Talks on Music”, a series of lectures given in 1974. I say carefully edited because Clive and Carol Robbins have been meticulous in preserving Paul Nordoff’s voice, while also conveying his boundless passion for music and his unerring insights into its inner workings. But for me, this book is more than a monument to Paul Nordoff’s enormous contributions to music therapy; it is a testament of the Robbins’ dedication to their colleague, and a model of professional integrity for all of us to emulate.”
.....These words capture the essence of my own response to the book. I find Healing Heritage to be a very carefully edited version of the famous “Talks on Music”, and Carol and Clive Robbins’ dedication and respect for Nordoff’s work is present in every line of the text. The introductory chapter includes a short biography of Paul Nordoff, information about the course and the students. The introduction also includes notes on preparing of the text, (which is based on Nordoff’s own notes and on audio-tapes of the lectures). The 18 other chapters are all “explorations” of musical elements, idioms, and techniques: of scales; steps, skips and creative leaps; tonal directions; the life of the intervals; triads and inversions; seventh chords; tension and relaxation; musical archetypes; pentatonic harmonization; styles and idioms of improvisation; etc. The students’ contributions to the explorations sometimes “come through”, but only rarely and vaguely (Tom plays a chord here and Unni gives a suggestion there). These are Paul Nordoff’s lectures.
.....To have access to the reflections of a man with such a close and developed relationship to music, as Nordoff had, is no small thing. It took a long time for me to read and work through Healing Heritage. This is a book you read while sitting at the piano, since Nordoff gives many brief examples from the compositions of Bach, Beethoven and others. After having played the musical examples given in the text, and read Nordoff’s comments, I was inspired to look up and play through the complete compositions. In this way Nordoff’s text functioned as a door opener, sometimes to music that was new for me, more often to music I knew but had forgotten, or music I knew but still could (re)discover.
.....At times I have problems understanding what Nordoff wants to tell us, as, for instance, on page 2, where he suggests that every scale is absolutely different in terms of possibilities for composition. He plays the opening of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C Major, op. 53, “Waldstein”. The text describes how he plays the first three measure in C major, then in F major, and expresses: “You can’t imagine it in F major! It’s just inconceivable”. I do not get Nordoff’s message here, since Beethoven himself could conceive this theme in F major (as it appears in bar 90 of this sonata). I do not know exactly what Nordoff is trying to tell us here, except: “listen to the music, to every small detail of it!”
.....And that is no small message or challenge. I do recommend Nordoff as a guide, provided you remember: listen to the music, to yourself, and to your clients, but not too much to Paul Nordoff’s words. I am reminded of Nordoff and Robbins’ own rich description of their early work, as for instance, in Therapist in Music for the Handicapped Child (1971/1992), where they tell us the story of how they were fighting for their right to listen to the music and the client with open ears and minds. They were fighting against limitations suggested by traditional anthropological thought and anthropological music therapy.
.....So there is a responsibility resting on the shoulders of the reader here, a responsibility to use Nordoff’s words as an inspiration and not as a limitation. The text shows us which music inspired Nordoff and his work: the European classical tradition from Bach, Mozart and Beethoven to Debussy, Ravel and Falla was of major importance for him. Of course there were also other influences: for instance, Gershwin, and the less famous Spanish composer, Nin-Culmell. His interest for and knowledge about several ethnic idioms also inspired him to use elements of these in his improvisations. This is quite an impressive palette. Most music therapists are more restricted in their musical skills and knowledge. Still, contemporary music therapists might want to add other names and idioms to their list of influences. Contemporary jazz, rock and pop music might need to be included, or 20th century composers as Cage, Boulez and Reich. Since few of us are able to cover it all, this will mean that we will have to leave some of Nordoff’s influences behind.
.....Or maybe not. Maybe we could include a lot of influences, and Nordoff will certainly be one of those for many of us, but we need to work continuously with our own relationship to music and our own ideas about music. Such things cannot be inherited. Personally, I feel I can learn from some of Nordoff’s ideas about music; others I find more difficult to relate to. I do, for instance, find – in Exploration One – the examples of scales as musical statements very interesting, while I think it is problematic to construct a system of distinctions between inherent directions of tones versus creative leaps – as is done on Exploration Two – without giving this a cultural context.
.....This last commne tof mine is related to more a general one: Nordoff’s concept of culture is rather limited. Culture is mostly seen by him as a limiting force to be transcended by archetypes and universal qualities of music. Culture as (foundation of) creativity and community is downplayed, although he also stresses the students’ “…cultural growth, which you know I view as so important for you all, because you will never have more to give a child that you have within yourself” (p. 203).
.....Nordoff’s ideas about archetypes in music – he suggests, for example, that the Children’s Tune is an archetypes (Exploration Fourteen) – are problematic for several reasons. One such reason is that the Children’s Tune is not found all over the world; it is not found in Russia, for instance (Bjørkvold, 1989/1992). Another reason is that Jung’s concept suggests that archetypes are basic and more abstract structures in the psyche, not concrete cultural expressions as is the Children’s Tune.
.....How to relate to these and other problems in the text is then a question of how to define Healing heritage. As suggested in the opening statement of this review, I think this book is an important historical document more than a guide to contemporary practice. It has been suggested that Nordoff and Robbins did not create or construct Creative Music Therapy, but that they discovered it. I have objections to this line of thinking (their personalities and cultural background certainly had a shaping influence on the approach), but still, let us follow it for a while. Robbins (1997) uses this allegory of discovery, when he says that they – unlike Columbus – knew when they had “discovered America”. Let me illustrate my point by using this allegory: In prehistoric times America was probably discovered on more than one occasion; in historic time it has been discovered at least twice, by Leifur Eirickson about 1000 years ago and by Christopher Columbus about 500 years ago. Their achievements will always be honored (sometimes also criticized, but at least never forgotten). To read their descriptions of America certainly has historical interest, but it would not be a good guide for visitors of America today.
.....In a similar way we need to “forget” some of Nordoff’s music and words, and develop new music and new concepts. We need, for instance, to develop more awareness and better understanding of atonal music, and we need to develop a “groovology” of music therapy. Many of our clients have a background from popular music, where the groove sometimes is the most significant quality in the music, as aspect that is not discussed by Nordoff. If we choose to let ourselves be inspired by his enthusiasm, knowledge, and love for music, we should make our own explorations, supported by contemporary ideas in musicology. To honor this man is not to copy him, rather to do our own creative explorations.
.....Thus it is not a limitation that Nordoff’s musical examples, to a large degree, are take from the tradition of classical tonal music. This is his music, and we are reminded of the necessity to use our own music as a point of departure. Improvisations could be seen as intertextual, not as natural or spontaneous expressions taken out of the air or from our soul, but as constructions borrowing elements from existing texts. Nordoff invites us to rediscover things we take for granted, such as the triad. He focuses on composers who in some way challenge tradition, like Debussy; “…because he was primarily the one who freed chords from the relationships of the traditional harmony of the past” (p. 68). So this is also a text about social (re)construction of music, and Nordoff gives several examples of composers who were able to rediscover and use creatively musical elements that may be taken for grated in traditional contexts. His love for these composers, and his ability to let them feed his own creativity, makes a strong impression on me.

References

Bjørkvold, Jon Roar (1989/1992): The Music Within: creativity and communication, song and play from childhood through maturity. HarperCollins, New York.
Nordoff, Paul & Clive Robbins (1971/1992): Therapy in Music for Handicapped Children. Victor Gollancz, Ltd., London.
Robbins, Clive (1998): ‘- It’s so universal! Clive Robbins interviewed by Brynjulf Stige.’ Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 7(1).