The days without music

Brian Gannon

The magistrate was leaning forward and looking over his glasses down at the boy, laying it on thick. He raked over the past few months. Shane had a number of problems, and we knew he was working pretty hard on most of them – but running away from the Centre put him beyond our control. There was a mandatory reporting for absconding, and this was the third time. “As a kindness,” the magistrate now reminded us, he had twice agreed that the boy could stay on at the Centre and avoid the very much more severe state-run alternative, but one thing Shane had never been able to do was to stay put.

Now the words from the bench were more attacking and demeaning, and though Shane probably didn’t understand most of them he was getting the message. Ungrateful, moronic, recalcitrant ... We had coached Shane about handling this kind of situation and the need for him to keep his big mouth shut, but we knew that he had his breaking point. The magistrate waved his finger at the boy, and went on, and on. Suddenly the boy’s eyes dropped and an expression of pain took over his face. He dropped his arms to his sides and clenched his fists ...

If this had been a movie, a sudden, deep and sustained bass note would have sounded, and the audience would have known that a critical moment was imminent. Watch carefully now, it would seem to say.

But there was no music in the court today. The critical moment had arrived, only the two of us on the staff of the Centre who knew Shane well knew it, and the consequences were disastrous.

* * *

However immune our modern age seems to be to symphonic music, most of us, young and old, are highly skilled at interpreting the mood of orchestral music. Film industry musicians are the poets of our age, able to translate into the mysteries of melody and harmony the intricate human emotions of anxiety and conflict, of excitement and suspense, of danger and chase.

The music in contemporary soundtracks offers us strong clues as to what is happening in the story line “and just as often what is happening behind the story. It also accompanies us through the less obvious, the moments of doubt when things may not be what they seem: while we are enthralled by the spirit of a light episode, the upbeat major key drops almost subliminally into the minor – and we know that all is not well. The music is an indicator, a warning, and also a confirmation of our perceptions and understandings. It is an almost universal parallel language reflecting the emotional subtext to the script.

Through our work with troubled kids, we are as susceptible as anyone to the intimations of music. We deal daily with fun and laughter, danger, despair and loneliness ... We respond to movie music like anyone else, though perhaps with more intensity. The searing hurt, the shrill terror, the discordant doubt, all evoke deeper responses in us because we experience these feelings acutely in our clients and, by association, in ourselves.

By the way, in our work with troubled kids, using a film with a reasonable musical score may be one of our best aids in helping them to be aware of feelings, to identify different feelings, and to accept their own feelings and express them. Musical scores universalise feelings “of sorrow, fear, betrayal, revenge, victory ... “There is,” they seem to say to our clients, “such a feeling as sorrow; people do feel loneliness ... “

We all know kids like Shane who tenuously bridge the gap between mastery and despair or between self-control and rage. We get to understand the strengths and weaknesses which terrify them, and we recognise the signs. We build incrementally on young people’s own self-understanding and their sense of safety ... but for us there is no sudden, deep and sustained bass note: we often discover the chasms by falling into them – or, better, by learning the seismic creaks and strains.

In our daily practice we do not have the benefit of those almost universally recognised thematic “sound-track" cues; we must be sensitive to our own accumulated experience and training, and especially to the minutiae of physical and facial expression which have meaning for us only through our investment in the life of another and the empathy we build. Sometimes the crash of broken glass or the cry of pain or anger beats us to it, but as we learn our craft we read our own signs and we work more pro-actively. This is our own music, not as pleasing or comfortable as the orchestral music, but increasingly helpful and familiar.

There are, of course, those other sound-track themes, not the cues and the warnings but the celebrations: when the jagged tensions and tortured discords become disentangled, when the threnody of loss moves out of the shade and into the sunlight, and the music lifts into one those rich major-key transpositions, with a crescendo and tutti which have everyone reaching for tissues at the denouement of the drama. And we, hardened child care workers that we are, must admit, mustn't we, that these affirming themes speak to us as loudly as they do to anyone else, that the reconciliations and homecomings and forgivenesses can easily reduce us to tears ... or at least push us nearer to the edge of our resistance?

But rarely is that music, when it comes, for us. The song of joy is not for us: it is something between the kids and their parents or loved ones, or it is a matter between the young people and their own ghosts. We hear it as though from the next room, knowing that it has been for their lives, not ours, that we have played a role.

It is enough for us to know that the music played. Tomorrow we resume our work, now with other lives, in days that may yet be without music.

* * *

"And what about Shane?" we hear someone asking. No violins played in the court that day. The judge, it seems, had no ear for music.