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Music Narrative
Music Narrative
Adrienne Cassel
30 January 2018
the radio. Music played a role in my life when I was young, but it hardly ever
left a strong impression on me. When I turned 18, I started spending loads of
time with my boyfriend's cousin, Alli, and her friend Malacai. Alli was my age
and a timid girl with hair that changed with her mood. She had a wonderful
voice and wrote and played all her own material that I had the pleasure of
listening to. Malacai was unique also, he was like a real-life Peter Pan. His hair
changed from dreads, to an unruly mohawk, to a long lion's mane in the time I
knew him. He had a really unimpeded way of living his life; he never cared
what people thought, he saw the unknown as an adventure and it rubbed off
up any instrument for the first time and play it like he'd been taking lessons for
years.
our arms around each other, laughing, loving, discovering who we were
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becoming; it was an entirely new kind of life for me. Furthermore, it was the
kind of music they listened to that gave me a new musical appreciation. Music
finally had meaning to me; It meant heart bursting happiness that brought on
dance, deep heartache that made me weep, and for the first time music helped
Soon after my 21st birthday I lost my job and for a fresh start my
boyfriend and I decided to move to Dayton. While searching for a new home an
opportunity to rent the most character filled house came upon us. The Hillcrest
house was an enormous old house and from the corner it sat on, it looked like
a giant dollhouse, as if you could just lift the top right off. It was brown and
pink with a window filled room at the entrance. Inside French doors framed
every entryway. There was a magical closet under the stairs, a window bed
overlooked the street that cried out to be napped in, and in one of the
bathrooms was an old clawfoot bathtub that I miss soaking in very much. The
house was too big and too expensive for my boyfriend and I, so we enlisted Alli
It didn't take long for Alli and Malacai to make friends with a great deal
of local musicians and we started putting together some epic house shows. We
would make a lineup of four to six bands and depending on the genre we'd
strategically schedule them through the night. Loud crazy punk bands played
in my dirty, cellar basement early in the evening and the string bands played in
our charming dining room. Sometimes bands traveling around the country or
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different scene in every room. I remember one night I got home from work and
found my middle school choir teacher, who had come to see Ali play, hitting a
joint and passing it on to the listener next to him. These shows happened
and Alli moved to Yellow Springs to attend school at Antioch, so I got new
roommates. We had a handful of shows after that but it was never the same. In
2014, Malacai came home from his travels and moved in with his girlfriend. On
the evening of July 9, 2014, driving his motorcycle home from work, Malacai
was hit by a drunk driver. He had been wearing a helmet but it didn't save him
from massive trauma to his brain. For a while there was a lot of uncertainty
about whether he'd live or not, but he is still with us although the accident
changed him forever. He lost complete function of his body and lost the ability
to speak. He will never live the same kind of life. He will probably also never get
to experience playing music again, but how do TBI patients experience music?
Music is proven to have great benefits for TBI (traumatic brain injury)
the result of the frustrations that come with losing some or all independence,
or noises having a much more profound and confusing affect than before.
Brain Injury" written by Soohyun Park, Reg Arthur Williams, and Donghyun
Lee in 2016 "preferred music" or music that the patient loved before the
accident is proven to reduce agitation and to help the patient have more
reasonable responses to stressful events. The reason the music is able to help
is because it stimulates the happy feelings the patient used to experience while
listening to the songs in the past. The therapy music provides is unparalleled
and can be a very effective nonmedication tool for a patient to control agitation.
Another benefit music has on TBI patients is its ability to increase the
use of body and brain function. In the article "Music and the Mind: Music’s
can have healing affects and make you smarter. "Brain plasticity" is the
promoting its function. Music has physical benefits which can be found "in
unarguably life enhancing. It can bring a person peace and send them to a
positive mind space to help overcome what can feel like a desperate situation.
Every person, no matter their age or brain function benefits from music's
knew that my time in the magical, musical Hillcrest house was coming to an
end. My housemates and I decided to throw one last enormous house show
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and we knew the show would be for Malacai. We threw a "Love for Malacai"
show where we raised $800 for his wheelchair and showed his mom how much
we all still loved him. All the bands he had played in through the years
reunited for him to hear, and all the local musicians he loved and respected
played for him too. The music played all night I think the show played from
5pm-4am. It was the first and only time the police were called because of the
noise, but they were touched by our cause and told us to stay in the back and
been, and to celebrate that he was still able to share good times and music
with us. It has been four years since his accident and two more benefit shows
have been thrown to raise money for treatments and he has improved. He can
now speak a few words, which helps his family care for him better, and he can
wrap his arms around his mom for much needed hugs. I don't see him, or
many of those old housemates very often now, but those times of my life will
gave me.
I would like to end this story with a poem written by my beautiful, loving,
Dear Malacai,
On that night,
about a year ago
when your head hit the pavement
and opened up, you spilled out
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Work Cited
Caroilyn S., Ticker. "Music and the Mind: Music's Healing Powers." Musical
doi:10.15385/jmo.2017.8.1.1.
Brain Injury." Western Journal of Nursing Research, vol. 38, no. 4, Apr.