New professor brings fresh ideas
Brian Abrams plays piano, guitar, percussion instruments, sings and writes his own music. However, Abrams is not the one-man band he sounds like. Abrams is a music therapist.
The new music therapy professor at Utah State University is excited about his new position but is a long way from home.
Abrams – who grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his parents – is always heavily involved in music, did his undergraduate work at Vassar University in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. and graduated in cognitive science. Abrams then studied music education at San Francisco State University when he realized he wanted to study music therapy and moved back east to get his second bachelor’s degree – this time in music therapy – from SUNY New Paltz in New York.
“I felt the potential of music was more about healing than just performance,” Abrams said.
Next, Abrams did his clinical internship at the Taconic Developmental Center in New York where he worked with adults with autism, mental retardation and other mental health issues. It was there that Abrams met his wife Julie, a USU alumna, who is also a music therapist and adjunct faculty at USU.
“It’s nice because we can understand what we talk about at the end of the day. We speak the same language,” Abrams said.
Abrams then attended Temple University in Philadelphia where he did his graduate studies in music therapy, received his doctorate in health studies and was certified in Guided Imagery and Music (GIM) which Abrams also did his dissertation on. Abrams focused his dissertation on special experiences clients had when participating in GIM.
“GIM is a form of music psychotherapy where the client images to selected recordings of classical music in a non-ordinary state of consciousness while dialoguing with a trained guide,” Abrams said. “Clients can have body experiences, visual imagery, memories, biographical healing, transformed experiences and sometimes transpersonal experiences,” he said.
Abrams said transpersonal experiences are when a client has an experience of “self” beyond the normal realms of ego and identity. For some clients, this may be spiritual and for others it is an experience of feeling as though your “self” is expanded. Abrams had a former professor who used GIM with a number of patients dying of AIDS, and Abrams himself said he has had transformational and healing experiences through music.
Before coming to USU, Abrams was a teaching assistant at Temple University and worked with music therapy in special education and psychiatric facilities. Abrams’ primary interest however is music in medicine.
Abrams said, his most challenging and yet rewarding job thus far was setting up a music therapy program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Cancer Center. There Abrams helped patients and family deal with the disease through different types of music therapies including improvisations.
“Improvisation allows someone to sound their experience through a creative medium in ways that they couldn’t express in words,” Abrams said.
He also used methods such as song writing and a musical-life review where patients connected certain songs or pieces of music with periods of their life and made a musical collage.
To many, music therapy – although it has been in practice for 50 years – is a new and unheard of venue.
“A lot of the more traditional medical personnel had questions but the patients were almost always appreciative,” Abrams said. “There’s something very humanizing about music.”
“Universal” is the word Abrams uses to describe music therapy because it can be used to help so many people.
“Pre-birth to the dying process, all ranges of intelligence, physical abilities and psychological states,” Abrams said about those it can help.
Music therapists are used in geriatric and psychiatric facilities, at disability and developmental centers, in many medical fields and for people old and young with physical, emotional or mental disabilities, Abrams said.
Music therapist students also have the opportunity to participate in an advanced placement program where they volunteer at Hospice, an organization that cares for the terminally ill, and design music experiences to meet the specific needs of the patients whether it be managing physical pain, overcoming fear or learning to let go and embrace death, he said.
Music therapists are also well-known for helping autistic children, whether it be on an educational level helping the children learn basic skills through music or establishing new lines of communication and sometimes bringing the child out of their isolated shell.
“There are a lot of ways of working with autistic children,” Abrams said. “To me, it represents a unique discipline and profession involving the relationships between music experiences, human relationships and health. I think that is what uniquely defines music therapy.”
Abrams is excited to teach the students at USU the combination of how all the pieces of music therapy interact.
“When I first came here, I felt a very strong, positive sense from the students here in the sense of their musical talent and motivation,” he said.
“There is a tremendous amount of talent in this department – faculty and students,”Abrams said.
Abrams is very passionate about his work. He is excited
“I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what already exists in the field and I feel like the field has just scratched the surface of what could be,” he said.