Introducing Brigitte 

Brigitte works as a music therapist at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital, on the Open Access for Nordoff Robbins and for the ‘Music in Mind’ program from Manchester Camerata. She is also a member of the German Protestant church in Manchester, where she plays the organ and runs the choir. Originally from Freiburg in Germany, she has lived in Manchester since 1993. 

Brigitte's musical background Brigitte grew up with music all round her, as her parents were professional musicians (performing as a piano duo), and energetic teachers at home. 

"My father taught at the Freiburg music college. My mother later did as well, she was very much into the pedagogic and methodology of piano teaching, but together they also had private students coming to the house. They came up with this rather ingenious idea, I think, that every child who came for piano lessons to them also needed to come a second time during the week in a group, with other children of the same age, to learn everything that makes up the education of a musician, such as improvisation and composition, a lot of aural training. For the really young ones… I think my mother would do things like rhythms and movement and playing instruments. So, that was really nice. It felt like it was a complete music place I grew up in. I’m one of four and we all played instruments, and I think we did very little else, actually! But we did music really thoroughly and in great width and breadth. Now I’m married to an English man, we’re both musicians and music plays a huge part in our lives." 

One of the most important strands of Brigitte’s work as a musician is her role in the German church in Manchester, a space she understands as more than a church, because of its strong cultural function in providing a space for people to speak German with one another. Her choir has been transformed, but also expanded during the time of Covid. 

"I am Protestant and I really, really enjoy providing music to the German church and the services. I play the organ there. Also we’ve got a choir we started back in 2002. It’s a very small group, but very competent singers and very loyal. We did a lovely ‘pro-Europe’ event, because, as Germans in Britain, we were all strongly opposed to Brexit and went onto the marches, some of us. And then we decided to celebrate Europe, and there was a lovely photo exhibition and we were asked to provide some music at the opening at the Alliance Française, the French Alliance place in town. We sang European songs and that was nice and that was totally non-related to church. It was a lovely outside-church thing." 

"We found a way to sing during lockdown, which I’m really grateful for. We’ve done singing projects. The German church in the UK is in, I think, three or four big areas and the Germans are catered for well locally, but the vicars sometimes travel a long way. So, our vicars look after people in Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford, Leeds, Nottingham, Lincoln, Sheffield – it’s a huge area! But, because we’ve done our singing rehearsals on Zoom, everybody could join in which, under normal circumstances, they couldn’t. And also everybody could take part in these projects where I prepared songs, hymns and pieces and sent them out with a backing track on music and people recorded their parts, send them to me and I mix them together and they were put in the online service." 

"We started around Easter time. The first project was just Easter hymns and then the next one, we got one Sunday that’s called Cantata, so it was all about singing and I gave everybody five songs to record. One of them was ‘Day by day’, from a 60s/70s musical. I think that shows that it’s not all four-part church hymns! We try to include other things as well and different styles, different idioms." 

"We’ve not tried anything really daringly new, but we’ve tried songs that people didn’t know beforehand and that we then tried to rehearse. Some of the singers don’t need the rehearsals, they just go ahead and do it, and others need the rehearsals and find it really helpful, it helps them to record their own parts. So it’s a little bit of a mix. It’s been great fun and we got loads of good feedback and that’s been good." 

Brigitte's training and path into Music Therapy 

Brigitte did postgraduate training in Music Therapy in 1988, and worked in London before settling in Manchester (and after a period in Berlin). 

"I think that music is important for life, and it brings people together, and it’s got a huge power to reach people, to connect people, to help them with problems of relating or mood, anything really. It’s quite a powerful thing. I love the music therapy side, I really, really do. I think it’s just the best. When it works, it’s absolutely the best. When you can help somebody through music, it’s so powerful, so wonderful." 

"I work for a big charity called Nordoff Robbins. During my time in Manchester, they have opened a base, a second training centre here, which has been really exciting. And, since then, we’ve had new music therapists join the team every two years, which is exciting, and I think it has given music therapy a huge boost up here. I work two days in the children’s hospital for them. One day is funded by CLIC Sargent, so that’s the children’s oncology ward and bone marrow transplant ward and stem cell and gene therapy ward – three wards all together and treating cancer patients. The other day is funded by the hospital school. I see patients with additional needs – so, children with disabilities or autism or complex needs. I’ve got a big trolley full of lovely instruments and I wheel it around and offer bedside sessions. Under normal circumstances – pre-COVID – there would be a group session on each of those days. On the oncology ward, there’s a little play room and we have a half-hour session where children can come together and play music together and I facilitate that. And, on the other day, I do a group session on the neuro rehab ward, and that’s for parents, nurses, student nurses, play leaders, physios, colleagues, children, and they were at a high point, really, when COVID struck, and everybody misses them badly." 

After a period of being furloughed, Brigitte has been able to start some work again, in one-to-one sessions and even singing through masks. 

"We came up with a very detailed risk assessment and, both the hospital ward managers and Nordoff Robbins, on behalf of the music therapists and me personally, we’re happy with those risk assessments. I signed that I wouldn’t do group sessions, that we wouldn’t share instruments, that there wouldn’t be any blowing instruments. Nordoff Robbins wanted me to sing with a mask and a visor and the hospital wards are happy for me to sing with a special type of mask. It’s all been negotiated and come to an agreement and we found a way to do sessions in person." 

"I think a lot of the children knew me already. Of course, there are children who don’t know me. But they see everybody else in masks – nobody’s allowed into hospital without the blue hospital masks – so it’s just become the new norm, hasn’t it? The children are used to it. Very interestingly, just last week, there’s one child I work with who seems a little speech delayed – and, I wouldn’t have raised the point with her mother but the mother raised it in a session with me – and I suddenly thought maybe the child has a little small hearing impairment and then, after the session, I found a colleague from the play department and together we were thinking whether the fact that she only hears other adults, apart from mum, and mum doesn’t wear a mask – they are in total isolation, they’re in a cubicle – so, apart from mum, everybody else has a mask and we were just wondering whether the fact that, since March, she’s only met adults who speak to her through a mask, whether that’s something to do with the fact that she doesn’t produce a variety of speech sounds." 

"And that has made me realise what is lost, and that affects a whole generation of babies, doesn’t it? It’s the weirdest thing! I mean, children at home, presumably, they’re okay, because parents don’t have to wear masks at home. But, in hospital, it’s different, especially these long term patients, they must be really affected by this. It’s very strange. But she suddenly made an ‘L’ sound and then I consciously broke all the rules, I put down my mask just for a moment to show what it looks like when I sing ‘La, la, la’, just so that she makes the connection. And I quickly put it back up again! But it’s weird." 

Shifting beyond classical traditions 

Having trained as a pianist at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, and Brigitte’s deepest musical attachment is to western classical chamber music. But as a music therapist, she draws on very different resources. 

"I love chamber music. That’s my ultimate love in music. String quartet, piano chamber music, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven. I was just thinking the other day, my best present my mother gave me once was a ticket to hear the whole cycle of Beethoven string quartets. We listened to them together, it was four or five evenings, and it was just a wonderful, wonderful experience. So, that’s my love." 

"As music therapists we’re trained to try and be fairly fluent at playing a big number of styles on the piano. The music I improvise with clients is very different. I think necessarily because nobody knows Brahms or a lot of people have not come across Romantic classical music, it’s just such a specialist niche, isn’t it? So, I find the songs that I write with clients or for clients are more rock-y, I suppose! Or maybe in the direction of folk music. It’s got to be an idiom that everybody understands, and everybody can join in with, hasn’t it? At the hospital, it’s occurred to me that a lot of the patients are from non-white, non-Western backgrounds. So, this idea that music is the common language is really put to the test there." 

"In my head, I think the simpler I can go, the less complete I can be in the music, the more it leaves space for the other person or the parent or somebody to put something in. I mean literally a tambourine or a darbuka drum and my voice often works, especially in the music for children. I think there is a commonality and universality of sort of really simple tunes. In Nordoff Robbins’ music therapy, we talk about ‘the child’s tune’ a lot, just three notes. When you nurse children to sleep, or you rock them, or children on the playground when they tease each other, it’s often those three notes that are used, aren’t they? I think that is intercultural and understood by everybody. I’m really aware of this because often parents of children who I work with are intrigued and then they want to show me the tunes that have come to their mind, or they want to show me classical Indian music or classical Pakistani music on the oud or something and it’s always really enriching to hear that, because most of it is new to me, but it’s often something that we can talk about and have a conversation or I can say ‘You can do that tune on the keyboard or on the bells’ or I can extract something that enables the child to be part of it." 

Brigitte had a very challenging start to her life in Manchester but developed an enthusiasm for the city over time. 

"It was very tricky at first because I came when I was very pregnant and had one child who could walk and one child who couldn’t, and my husband took the job in Chetham’s [School of Music]. It was a dream job for him, and he was out for many, many hours and we’d just moved into a big house and I knew nobody and it was really, really trying – very, very difficult – and I hated the place for many years! Sorry to say! It was an awful time, a really, really bad time. But [Manchester is] surrounded by amazing countryside, which I absolutely adore. And I think the city itself has seen such change over the last ten years – it’s just unbelievable. Now, it’s got wonderful things like, a little while ago, the Streets Ahead Festival." 

"This was a street festival with a parade and it was just extraordinary, really creative. It no longer exists and it turned into other things. It was run by a group of wonderfully artistic people. I think it was four people and they were friends of a friend of mine and they put together these amazing events, which I felt really proud to be living here, to be benefiting from these things. There were European artists and musicians, circus artists, ventriloquists, anything! They’d be either in a park or in the middle of town. Great big parades with amazing visual displays or wonderful things. I think that happened every two years or so. When our children were little, it was just a high point and exciting!"