A Tribute to Clive Robbins 1927–2011

Abstract

I wanted to start this essay by saying how fortunate I was to count Clive as a colleague and a friend and how much I will miss him; I then realized that much more important than my personal loss will be the loss of such a warm, dynamic, and visionary man to the profession of music therapy; this subsequent thought was itself soon replaced by the notion that, although none of them have actually met Clive, in a sense it is actually the tens of thousands of clients of music therapists who were influenced by Clive that will miss him the most. No individual person respected clients more than Clive, no one challenged them more or demanded more of them, and certainly no one loved them more than Clive. These attitudes - which are strongly connected to each other - permeated Clive's being and radiated out to anyone who read his publications, heard him speak, or viewed his clinical work. No therapists with an open heart could come into contact with Clive and not have their clinical work and the way they relate to clients forever changed in ways that reflected Clive's beliefs.Clive's contribution to music therapy was sustained for over 53 years, beginning with meeting Paul Nordoff in 1958 and ending only with his passing in 201 1 . It was also widespread as Clive traveled and taught throughout North America, South America, Australia, Asia, the Middle East, and in every region of Europe. As the co-originator of Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy, the importance of Clive's life and work - and his influence on music therapy and the world - will take years and many investigations to fully document. These investigations will highlight a number of well-known elements of Nordoff-Robbins work that Clive originated: a belief in creativity and intuition as equally important parts of the therapist's approach and the client's experience; his emphasis on quality music and instruments as essential components of effective therapy; an emphasis on individualized treatment borne out of a recognition that each human being's fate was to become more fully n/mself or herself as unique beings, a process in which music therapy could play a central role; and last, a belief that human beings had a unique relationship to music that allowed it to play a central role in awakening awareness of the self, facilitating its ability to mobilize itself in intentional action directed towards self-actualization.Yet there were many other dimensions to Clive and many other areas in which his influence has been felt in music therapy. It is these perhaps less heralded contributions that I would like to discuss in the balance of this article, as they serve to draw a more complete portrait of the man and his work. I would like to focus on a few aspects of Clive's earlier life as they are likely to be less well known.Clive was a teenager in Great Britain at the time of World War II. His goal was to become a pilot in the Royal Air Force, and to expedite this process he joined the RAF when he was 16-years-old as a technical apprentice working on precision navigation equipment used in airplanes. Clive was quite accomplished in this work as it brought together his quick and insightful mind, his truly gifted way with tools, and his innate understanding of the functioning of all things mechanical. Clive was working on the cutting edge of technology here in its applied dimension.This aspect of his being was clearly manifested in his early and ongoing embrace of all things technical in the service of music therapy. As early as 1960, Clive was utilizing the highest quality portable reel-to-reel audio recorders that could be reasonably secured at the time to record and preserve all of Nordoff's and his clinical work and teaching. In the mid-1970s when audio cassette tapes first started becoming widespread, Clive ensured that the major publication of his and Paul Nordoff's work together - Creative Music Therapy (Nordoff & Robbins, 1977) - was published together with an audio cassette containing clinical examples. …