I have always loved to sing. Some of my earliest memories are of my family singing together in the car and my parents harmonizing over the dishes. At the age of five, my older sister joined the junior choir at the church where our father was the minister. I had a hard time understanding why I couldn’t be there, too. She came home and taught me all the songs.

As my sister learned instruments in school, she brought them home to teach me: flutaphone, recorder, ukulele…I had some piano lessons (which I eventually traded in for painting lessons) and when the girl next door started showing us how to play her guitar, we both received guitars for Christmas. I WAS in the junior choir by that time, and the director found me playing my friend’s guitar during a break, and suggested I bring mine. That’s how I got started. I loved it: it was easier than piano, portable and it provided great background for my singing.

The Church gave me my beginning in music, and has played a role at many times: church choirs, learning the history of music by singing it – richness of various periods and composers. At the same time, growing up as a minister’s daughter there was a quest for something else.

I started flute in grade 6 when St FX University in Antigonish NS started a school band program. At 13, after moving to Sydney, in Cape Breton, I was able to continue with the flute but had only one year of singing in grade 10, a big disappointment; however, during that year I found a book of madrigals in a cupboard. As the singing program died, I lost my innocence, and stole a copy of the book. I knew about piano and flute lessons, but had no idea one could study voice the same way.

At 25, I set out travelling around Europe by myself, visiting friends in Paris and family in Holland and Denmark; and discovering sculpture and stone, architecture, and tastes and smells. It was wonderful!  I felt restless while travelling through the North, until, coming down along the Romantic Road in Germany, I reached Lindau, a town south of the Bodensee, or Lake Constance, where southwestern Germany and Switzerland meet. There I felt like I was home. That was my first concrete experience of knowing another lifetime.  That night, in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, sleeping on the floor beside a baby grand piano in a friend’s home, my life changed. I discovered lieder, the classical art songs of Schubert along with some Brecht and several other composers. Included in the stash on the piano was a song for peace I later learned was sung by the people in the Swiss Resistance. I had studied German for 4 years, and was able to grasp the lyrics, and in my heart somehow knew the song. I made copies of a few songs, and continued on my way. I knew by the end of the trip, I wanted or needed to study music, and voice and sculpture, which was also new to me.

Returning to Montreal, where I was living at the time, I entered a BFA program at Concordia. While waiting to begin, I heard an arrangement of the English folk song “Barbara Allen” working its way through my mind, beckoning me to write it down. I really knew I was ready, and the composer/arranger was born. In my third year, the inner voice came out again, asking how shall I actually earn a living. In 1989, I came to Ottawa for the national conference of the Canadian Association for Music Therapy, and by the time I left, I had had my interview and was on my way to Vancouver to continue my studies.

Music took on a whole new meaning there. When I was young I had found peace at the piano when family discord arose. In the piano studio at Concordia, I discovered how playing could support my breaking through emotional blocks. And my songs emerged that reflected the inner turmoil and joys of the period. In school I found that applying instrumental and vocal improvisation in therapy seemed natural. Working with others to express their inner world though song choices or rhythm instruments grew into my profession.

To sing takes courage. Other instruments take technical ability to make a sound, skills to sound good, but the instrument is what makes the sound, and its maker puts the quality into the instrument. The voice is different. It comes from our body and emotions, and I find the energetic model which comes from the Eastern traditions makes more sense for understanding this. Our quantum physicists have found that our bodies are made up of vibrating energy. These energy particles can be organized by sound. You’ve heard the expression “You are what you eat”. Well, we are what we listen to, too. Which means we are shaped by the sounds and other vibrations around us. In the Hindu tradition we learn about the chakras, or energy centers and aura or energy bodies, which are permeable layers of energy fields of different frequencies, which have a registry, of sorts, for our emotions, thought forms and spiritual beliefs. The child who is raised in violence and arguing, becomes fearful and defensive. There are studies by Dr. Emoto on frozen water which has been treated by emotions – words written on the bottles. The emotions bring about different crystalline snowflake shapes. Hate is angular and harsh. Love is symmetrical and proportional. We are what we listen to or sing.

At times, I have been so caught up in other’s songs that I have strained to hear my own melody, but something has happened and song finds me and pulls me back in. At times, I have forgotten to listen, and the realization has brought me back to its path.   It is part of what I am. And once and a while, I realize I haven’t been taking my voice for enough walks, and it gets’ out of shape. I know how I am by my voice and what I am singing.

What is music?

It is expression, it is a way to voice the inexpressible, at times. Without words melody comes straight from the heart and reaches directly to the soul. I’ve come to realize that words can be limiting: we often struggle to say things which we have not yet consciously explored. But through instruments and the voice we can do it. Words are a prism or filter through which we seek to express. But the voice is owned even by ones without languaging ability. From the baby’s first cry, to our last gurgle our voices are with us.  Using my voice, I have been able to build relationship with a man in his 70s who experienced brain damage at birth, and who, we suspected, had received little attention other than someone feeding him and changing his diaper for most of his life. His voice was loud and pervasive in the hospital where he lived, like a rooster. In his group home, with music therapy, he quieted down and showed preferences for different styles of music, especially the female singing voice. As I sang with him, we developed conversations based on sighs and tones, and on hearing I was leaving, he expressed his sadness. Another person, this one a child, who again had experienced neglect and abuse, found self-confidence and self-esteem through the discovery of his hidden talents, which emerged by playing and singing together. Music comes straight from the Soul and carries all the emotion needing to be expressed and doesn’t need any translation.

When I have doubts or questions, Spirit sometimes responds with a new song, a composition. It happened when I needed a way to address closure with a group of incarcerated teens, and again after a difficult conversation with a minister around theology.  Songs may come in the middle of the night, as in the first case, or after meditation or walking the dog.

Music is comforting and grounding: The autistic child who centers herself through humming; The monk who uses chant to pray and its health-giving benefits.  Music urges community. It brings communication, social interaction and expression; it is shouts of acclamation and joy, love songs and anger, and is shut down by fear and terror. It is a measure of the health of a culture and community. It is meditation. It offers a metaphor for life, and teaches us how to live in harmony.

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Disclaimer: I am not a Music Therapist Accredited (MTA) as the byline suggests. – Heather

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Krystal has a blog, This Hat is a Helmet; stories about my life with post-concussion syndrome. She just wrote a lovely post about Pam helped her not only with getting to the hospital in the middle of the night, but with adjusting her attitude in a tough situation.

It’s a beautiful example of Pam’s role in the world of helping others to shine.

Check it out:

https://thishatisahelmet.blogspot.com/2020/12/light.html

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We rarely saw each other in those days. She didn’t have much money for travel, and I was holding the fort in Nova Scotia as the meat in the generational sandwich.

That’s when she painted this watercolour. I see it as a visualization of what she wanted to make happen for herself: a cozy place of her own, decorated in her favourite cheerful colours, where she could make music, create art and read books, along with her little dog Winnie who, in the painting, embodies relaxation and comfort.

The Ottawa apartment where she lived for the 5 years before she died came close to this vision. She never did get a real piano, but it was a creative place for her. She had good neighbours and wonderful places to walk Winnie along the nearby Rideau River. Emptying the apartment and dispersing her possessions after she died felt brutal and intensely poignant.

In May 2018, ten years after making the painting above, Pam was taking the Level 2 training in Guided Imagery with Music (GIM). In a GIM session, the client goes on a guided exploration of their subconscious while listening to carefully selected pieces of classical music. Afterwards, they are asked to create a “mandala” drawing (in a circle) to document their experience.

Pam created the image below after being the “client” in a session using music chosen to invoke feelings of “caring”. In this case, Pam evidently explored self-care and also brought in the care of our mother who had died in June 2014. I like how this drawing complements the previous one, showing Pam’s inner expansion in the intervening years.

The text reads:

I like how her envisioned home in the second picture is a broad, open space with lots of windows, surrounded by love. There’s a warm place to relax in the middle of the spaciousness. The upright piano of the earlier painting has become a grand piano. (Our mother loved to play with colours, and encouraged us to develop a fine appreciation of which colours looked good on us or around us. “The Marco Polo table” is a creative writing project that Pam was working on, left unfinished).

This picture suggests to me that Pam had “leveled up” in her sense of herself and in her aspirations.

I hope she is now enjoying her “expanded spirit home” and envisioning something even more grand.

Heather Holm, January 2020

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The songs worth writing are the ones I’ll want to sing over & over. Those that set the tone I want in my life.

Pamela Holm

PERSONAL LIFE GOALS

Living in the present

For songwriting
What do I value – really

Love – witness – I see examples of it everywhere – feel examples

Peace – when I read about war, & remember previous tension

Healing – What is it?
– A chance to do it again & get it right

The Earth

Community – be there call people. M—– is a model there.

Friendship

Joy – do it with joy – all of it

Knowledge – use it from that come wisdom

The songs worth writing are the ones I’ll want to sing over & over. Those that set the tone I want in my life.

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The first picture is probably from 1972 when she was going on 12 in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. She was so tall that younger kids thought she was a teacher and wanted to hold her hand during recess.

We moved to Sydney from Antigonish in 1973. Pamela was almost 13. She joined the Sydney Schools Band, playing flute, which she had been learning already in Antigonish.

Grade 10 took her to Sydney Academy where there was an active drama club. There she is right in the middle of it:

That led to more local fame – there she is in the middle again:

She graduated from Sydney Academy in 1978. Here she is (below) looking tall, slim and poised.

I notice that she was finally rid of the bane of her teenage existence, the outdated cats-eye glasses that she must have been removing for the photos above. (I had to laugh when they came back in style recently.)

She’d also been the Drama Club’s princess in the school’s Winter Carnival.

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