Music For Kiddos Podcast
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I hope that you have been enjoying this Music For Kiddos Symposium Presenters’ series we have been doing on the blog and on the Music For Kiddos Podcast. We are interviewing each and everyone of the speakers leading up to November 12th, 2021, when the Music For Kiddos Symposium is taking place. If you missed the previous interviews, so far we’ve had the opportunity to talk with Franklin Willis, Kaiti Shelton & Rich Abante Moats, who are wonderful music therapists and music educators who you should know.
This time, we got to interview some of my favorite people in the whole entire world. We get to hear from Lorrie Kubicek and Kimberly Khare who are my personal mentors and two people I love so much. The older I get, the more I realize how much time, energy and care they dedicated to me as a young music therapist, something that I know changed my life.
Lorrie Kubicek, MT-BC is a board certified music therapist and program manager for Expressive Therapies at Massachusetts General-Brigham Hospital. With 20 years professional pediatric music therapy experience and 7 additional years doing music and creative arts at Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for children with medical needs, Lorrie finds a very effective balance between traditional music therapy techniques, childhood development knowledge and clinical fun.
Kimberly Khare, MT-BC is a board certified music therapist and a Nordoff-Robbins music therapist. She is Song Studio Director for Next Step, a Boston-based non profit that empowers young people living with serious illness to create their brightest future. As a multi-instrumentalist, her work in Next Step's recording studio focuses on helping young people develop their narrative, mindset and advocacy through original songwriting, production and performance. For 25 years she has worked in community-focused settings supporting children, families, teens and young adults by designing and facilitating programming that helps them build their accessibility, creativity and agency. Kimberly has taught at Berklee College of Music for 19 years, ushering in the next generation of music therapists by helping them hone in on their clinical musicianship. Be careful when you ask her about music and/or being a music therapist - because she might take up the next several hours of your life!
Lorrie Kubicek and Kimberly Khare will be presenting at the Music For Kiddos Symposium on November 12th. Their presentation entitled: “Vocal Play: How Vocal Creativity, Spontaneity, Flexibility and Levity can Support Relational Connections and Clinical Outcomes."
We interviewed Lorrie Kubicek and Kimberly Khare on the Music For Kiddos Podcast, and here are some of the highlights:
“[Vocal Play] is about creating connection with the kid that I'm working with or it's about helping to create connection for that child with their music, with maybe the instrument they're playing or maybe how they're just sort of standing near the door, cause you know, they've decided the sessions over… it’s about using the voice as the principal or the primary instrument of connection and relationship. So you might be holding the guitar, you might be at a piano or xylophone or a drum, but you're choosing with intention to reach out and create connection of any kind (initial or sustained), just little moments of connection with your voice.”
“We call it clinical fun. It's what we strive for the kids. We want them to play because in playing, they learn they're safe and we want them to have their own intrinsic experiences of empowerment as a kid. They might be already powerless and they might be in an even more powerless situation if they've got a particular condition or illness. And so, we are trying to get them to relax and to breathe and to play and to center and to have control.”
They continued:
“Experimentation is really important for the actual clinical work, but for what this presentation [at the Music For Kiddos Symposium] is, we want people to experiment with their voices and to trust it and to do it in a way that it's not necessarily entirely planned but it is an important option and it's easy to leave off the table.
It's as Lorrie's point, you bring your guitar into a session, but do you remember that you also brought your voice?”
Tune in to episode 39 of the Music For Kiddos Podcast to listen to the full interview with Lorrie Kubicek and Kimberly Khare.
Mark your calendars on November 12th, 2021 for the Music For Kiddos Symposium!
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