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BILL AHESSY Music therapist and choir facilitator
with the Meath community unit In my conversations regarding music therapy, a recurring theme was the creation of community. As a teenager, Bill Ahessy witnessed first-hand how creativity afforded people the opportunity for self-expression when he assisted his father, a primary school teacher who organised community dramas, with various stage productions in a small village in County Tipperary. In 1996, as the last weeks of secondary school drew closer, Ahessy heard about the Nordoff Robbins training course and its approach to music therapy. The concept of this innovative practice remained in the back of his head throughout his tenure in University College Cork, where he studied music. “We were offered an introductory module to music therapy but I didn’t get into that class,” Ahessy recalled. “I bought a book instead. It was the first book I bought online, The Music Therapist’s Handbook. I remember being very excited about it.” Leaving Cork, Ahessy traveled to Sydney where, fifteen-thousand kilometers from home, he fulfilled his clinical training and obtained a post-grad diploma in music therapy. Before returning to Ireland in 2009, he completed a Masters in Spain and worked in mental health facilities whilst living in London. Immediately, Ahessy noticed a marked increase in both posts created and media coverage of music therapy at home. It wasn’t long after he’d settled into his new routine when, following a conversation with Tallaght Hospital, he was approached with an exciting proposal. “The Meath Community Unit was offering to fund a research project to examine the effects of a music therapy choir on older adults. Over the course of a year, we had a control group and a choir group with twenty members in each. They were mixed groups comprised of people from the local community and from residential care,” Ahessy explained. Having previously worked with a music therapy choir in Australia, Ahessy was the ideal candidate to carry out the research. Over the course of the twelve-week programme, known as The Meath Community Project, Ahessy assessed participants through a number of intake interviews. The project was bookended with a series of identical tests, the final results presented remarkable changes across the choir group with over 54% of them experiencing an improved quality of life and a statistically significant change in cognitive function and depressive symptoms. Following on from the initial research programme, Ahessy kept the service going. Today, there’s a weekly choir session held every Friday featuring three members from the original group from the 2009 project. The benefits of music therapy choirs, as shown with the Dublin 8 participants, include enhanced physiological and emotional function. “There are many aspects to how singing can affect us,” Ahessy suggests. “Throughout the body, it can improve breath-control and create new neural pathways, which is particularly important for people with Alzheimer’s Disease. When someone sings a lyric that resonates with their biography it can enable them to revisit a particular memory. This shows us that there’s also an emotional strand to this practice. Another very important element is the social nature of singing in a choir. A lot of the feedback we received from the project was that the participants found a new sense of community through the sessions. From all this, we can see that music therapy has the ability to work on many different domains because it’s a very adaptable mode of treatment.” As well as facilitating the choir, Ahessy is a guest lecturer and supervisor at the University of Limerick. The institute is renowned, throughout the country, for its training in music therapy. A relatively small course with under twenty students choosing it, per annum, it’s heartening to know that there’s an interest in creative arts therapy amongst today’s students, ensuring its growth amongst future generations. ➝ Music therapy has the ability to work on many different domains because it’s a very adaptable mode of treatment. 28