Music Therapist Emily Hunt Photo: Supplied / Emily Hunt
Emily Hunt was originally a music teacher, but she noticed something about some of her students: how learning music not only made them better musicians, but happier people.
That realisation was the beginning of a story that would eventually lead her to buying an old caravan to convert into a mobile music therapy clinic for children.
Hunt went all the way to the northern Bay of Plenty to find her ideal therapy space.
"It was being used as a nature library ... and we've renovated it... We towed it back from Waihi Beach in 2020."
You'll see the Little Musical Caravan travelling around the streets of Porirua, Mana, Plimmerton, sometimes as far south as the Wellington suburb of Newlands, sometimes as far north as the Kapiti Coast, bringing musical medicine to children who are struggling with their own sense of who they are, or how to express that, or both.
Inside the mobile clinic. Photo: Supplied / Emily Hunt
Hunt describes her mobile clinic as a "bubble" full of musical instruments and toys.
"It's a quiet little haven where you can hide away in."
Speaking to RNZ Concert host Bryan Crump to mark the beginning of Music Therapy Week, Hunt says taking her clinic with her not only provides a ready-made space to do her work (when schools may be struggling just to provide enough classrooms). The caravan's interior is also perfect for music therapy.
"It's like a teardrop shape. So inside we kept all of the ribs, so you've got that sense of a curve over the top of it... It was exactly what I was looking for."
Hunt's mobile space is pretty much the opposite of the large, open-plan learning environments being built in many new schools now, which she says are often challenging for neuro-diverse kids.
Her interest in children comes both from being a mother of children with neuro-diversity, and her own experience as a neuro-diverse child.
Music therapy offers children ways of processing a sometimes overwhelming set of stimuli, becoming comfortable with who they are, and being able to express that self to others.
"Music is quite uniquely placed to be able to help people. I do believe that we are all innately musical, and that goes way back, even that mother and infant, with that dance very early in life, there's a kind of musicality to those initial interactions. So I think there's an element there of music being a very accessible tool, and you don't need to use words when you're making music."
Because sometimes, words fail us.
Come and join the Caravan. Photo: Supplied / Emily Hunt
In the four years since Hunt began her mobile therapy service, demand has grown to the extent she now has a permanent base, a 'therapy hub' in the Porirua suburb of Mana.
"The [Covid] pandemic had a massive impact on people's mental health... We're just coming out of that in some ways now, certainly we're getting a lot of referrals through, and also for a lot of younger kids that maybe didn't get the opportunity to socialise with playgroups in that period."
Hunt's own musical therapy is playing the piano "when I need some time for myself. Things like some Beethoven, Debussy perhaps, I quite lean into some of the French stuff as well".
She's an especially big fan of the music of Gabriel Grovlez.
You can hear a piece of his at the end of Hunt's conversation with Crump (see above) who found it had quite a medicinal effect.
We invite you to try it, and listen into RNZ Concert any time of the day or night.
Because really, every week should be a music therapy week.
