The healing sound of music

THE room is filled with enticing musical instruments - including a pair of maracas and a row of tubular bells - but the youngster shows no interest. He clambers onto the knee of his classroom assistant and holds onto her for comfort, avoiding eye contact with music therapist Angie Harrison.

But, as Angie strikes up an improvised song on her piano, the boy, aged about four, turns and listens, before tentatively picking up the maracas.

"Can you give it a shake?" she sings in her sweet voice. "Can you shake the maracas?"

A smile breaks across his little face. This is the boy's first music therapy session with Angie. Later, he can be seen banging a tambourine in delight and making rhythmic knocks on the wood in time to her piano playing.

By the sixteenth session, he has begun to communicate through the music and make vocal sounds. He even has the confidence to attend on his own, without the classroom assistant he once clung to. He beams at Angie as he engages her in eye contact and runs his hands through the swinging tubular bells while she plays her piano.

"It can be quite difficult to sing when you have a child looking at you in a way they've never looked before," she admits, as we watch the young boy's progress through video clips. "You can feel a lump in your throat."

For this youngster, she says, music was the key to him gaining confidence to meet new people, to be able to cope with change, and look people in the eye.

"Of course, he also had teachers working with him on specific things in the classroom, but music therapy was the catalyst to enable him to do things before that he never did," says Angie.

As head therapist with the North Yorkshire Music Therapy Centre based in Old Malton, Angie and her co-workers have helped many children and adults gain the confidence and ability to communicate with others. Some are locked in their own worlds, unable to reach out socially, while some have physical or learning difficulties. The music therapy involves using improvised music to build up a relationship with them.

"I try to set up the ideal conditions for spontaneous responses," says Angie. "We're trying to excite in an environment were people can explore and experiment. I like the idea that you can't get anything wrong. We have boundaries of course, if a child's shaking a cymbal about we don't want anybody getting hurt, but I think children love the chance to be spontaneous and noisy with no-one telling them to be quiet, and the confidence that can give them is wonderful."

The therapy centre began as a private practice in 1987 run by Mary and Raymond Abbotson, from Kirkbymoorside. But it later developed into a charity, and now has three, fully-trained music therapists. The therapists travel to schools, day centres, hospitals and individual homes across the North, with referrals from heath professionals, social services, teachers and individuals. Some children take weeks to respond, for others it takes years.

"We work with children and adults with a range of difficulties," says Angie. "Sometimes it's about how their energy comes out, which you can work on through music by helping them through the ebbs and flows. It's about rising up to the loud and down to the quiet. By doing that with something they enjoy they actually practise letting their emotions out.

"I used to work with an adult with autism who had boundless energy. He used to just explode sometimes, it was very difficult for him and everyone else. We built up the sound in music and he would get very animated and bit by bit, over a period of months, he began to adapt the therapy to his life. He was able to calm himself down and respond to people who cut in when he was on the way up, whereas previously he hadn't recognised there was a point of being 'on the way up'."

Angie, who grew up in Leeds, began playing the piano when she was seven before learning how to play the viola. She studied at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and went on to land her dream job as a violist in the world-renowned Hall Orchestra.

"I fell in love with the viola because it was such a mellow instrument," she says. "It doesn't often get centre stage, but it always provides the colour and the richness of the piece and I think that's stood me in good stead as a music therapist."

Working with the Hall, Angie played in concert halls across the world, from the Carnegie Hall in New York to the Berlin Philharmonic Hall. But in 1991, when she was playing in the Ryedale Festival in North Yorkshire, she was introduced to her future husband, farmer Bruce Harrison, and an end to the world travel beckoned. She commuted for the best part of a year to the Hall's concerts in Manchester while working as an assistant music therapist with the Old Malton centre. But she soon decided to leave the orchestra and took a postgraduate diploma at Anglia Polytechnic in Cambridge.

"I'd been playing to massive audiences and staying in Beverley Hills just before, so it was really down to earth with a bang when I went to Cambridge," she says.

But she had another chance to taste stardom, playing viola in the 1998 Scarborough-shot film Little Voice with actress Jane Horrocks - now one of the centre's patrons.

"It was a 'blink and you'll miss it' moment," she smiles. "But I thought the way Jane Horrocks played Little Voice was so much like the people we work with, the way music is their life. It was excellent."

Angie was promoted to head therapist with the centre about four years ago. But she still plays her viola in two string quartets - one at weddings and functions and another which raises funds for the charity.

She is also playing in a special performance of a sell-out production entitled HAT at Helmsley Arts Centre tonight, a strange, but novel, mixture of knitting, music and prose to help raise funds for the centre.

But she says it is the rewards she gets out of music therapy which make leaving the Hall behind worthwhile. "The rewards with the orchestra were somehow predictable because you knew how much you might enjoy it, according to the concert and the schedule," she says.

"But with music therapy you never know who's coming that week, who might have a breakthrough or do something you never dreamed they could possibly do. It's a rare privilege to be able to give new skills to people and share in some of their very personal expressions and help them through whatever they're going through into a different way of being."

* To make a donation or raise funds for the North Yorkshire Music Therapy Centre contact (01653) 698129.