Music Therapy Clinician: Supporting reflective clinical practice Volume 1 | Page 28

long time and that some of the rest
of us have been doing that too.

Roia: We did. And I don’t know,
Christine, if you mentioned that you
had spent a lot of years working at
Kardon as well. And I think that was
kind of where your part in this that’s why I wanted to include you
in this, it’s because I thought you
had done some really cool work
with that.

Christine: Thank you. Yeah,

I worked for many years at the
Kardon Institute for Arts Therapy in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That
site has, unfortunately, closed, but
while I was there I was able to
create a choral group for singers
who had intellectual disabilities and
other types of neurodevelopment
disorders. And it was really meant
to become a community group, a
community choir that featured and
sort of rallied around singers who
had disabilities. And we really
figured out a way to accommodate
everyone who wanted to sing. So
that’s really where my experience
comes in. And then I was able,
through that, to actually have a role
in helping other choirs who were
similar to get started and to actually
kind of bridge out and communicate
with other choir directors who were
doing similar work.

Roia: So, actually, all three of us

sort of came at this from slightly
different angles, but were all doing
stuff that would kind of ultimately
have the goal of being inclusive.
Angela, am I understanding that,
kind of, from your angle? I know
you actually said to me that your
initial intention was that wanting to
have an opportunity for students because you had some folks who
were students in addition to folks
who were clients - unless you call
them all clients. I’m sorry, I’m not
entirely certain how it all works at
Tempo! But that your initial hope
was to have recitals as well.

26 | P a g e

Angela:

Yes. We have a
spectrum of services, from just
traditional piano lessons, voice
lessons, guitar lessons. We have
adapted music lessons for some
individuals with special needs, and
then we have music therapy
services as well. So most of our
students in traditional lessons
participate
in
recitals.
We
encourage them to do so. But there
were some clients of ours that
wanted an opportunity to perform
outside of what we do in
therapy…just, on their own, wanted
to be able to come perform. There
are other members of the
community that we don