But in a year like this one, it breaks your heart. Heard at any time in the four decades since its making, “Echos” would be touching. Listening to “Echos” is as poignant as stumbling upon a roadside shrine of flowers, candles, and photos, but Ferreyra goes beyond creating a memorial to Mercedes: She defies death itself and resurrects her niece as an aural apparition. At other points, the melted murmurs and shimmered syllables feel soothing and psalm-like, as though the girl’s ghost is mourning herself. In places, the young woman’s voice flickers and trembles with playful delight, sounding impossibly alive. Recorded in 1978 but released for the first time this year, the piece is woven entirely from the voice of Ferreyra’s niece Mercedes Cornu, who died in a car accident prior to its composition. This is the first study to examine the therapeutic benefits of songwriting in a military population.Argentine composer Beatriz Ferreyra is renowned for the disorienting spatiality and shape-shifting abstraction of her electronic and tape-based work, but it’s the human scale and raw intimacy of “Echos” that startle. Songwriting enabled service members to share their thoughts, emotions, fears and hopes with family, friends and other providers, often for the first time, and as such played an important role in their personal growth and recovery process. The songs offer a window into service members’ lived experiences of military service, injury, recovery, homecoming, and transition from active-duty. Latent thematic analysis of the song lyrics yielded four main themes: (a) personal struggles and barriers to recovery, (b) moving forward, (c) relational challenges, and (d) positive relationships and support. Service members wrote songs over the course of two or more individual music therapy sessions. This study analyzed 14 songs written by 11 active-duty service members with post-traumatic stress disorder, mild traumatic brain injury, and psychological health conditions, who received music therapy services at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, a Directorate of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in the United States of America. Psychological and physical injuries may hamper successful reintegration into home life and communities and, as a result, many service members report feeling lonely, isolated and misunderstood. A successful transition to civilian life is challenging for many service members returning from deployment.
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