In one hand, Maggie Stiffler grips a suitcase stuffed with sweatshirts and sweatpants. In the other, the 24-year-old — with bangs that could just about be blonde or brown, almost to her eyebrows — clutches her guitar. She departs — more like races — for the Salt Lake City airport, hoping to escape COVID-19 and earthquakes, headed back to her childhood home in Pennsylvania, just long enough for things to get back to normal.
That’s what she tells herself, anyway. Just a month at home, and then she’ll come back to Utah and finish her internship, completing her master’s degree and placing her one board certification away from becoming a music therapist.
She still does three Zoom sessions per week — two with an addiction resource gym and one with a private client. So when her boss wants to talk a few weeks later, she figures she’s about to be invited back. It’s late April, and Utah is about to begin opening up. Instead, her supervisor tells her it’s not looking good. Most of their professionals aren’t allowed back into medical facilities, and some have started looking for work elsewhere. Maggie doesn’t say anything. Shock takes over. “I was just waiting out the storm,” she thought to herself later. “But I did not know that there were more storms right behind it.”
Maggie always loved music but was always shy. She couldn’t even play piano in front of her instructor. So she’d wait for her parents to leave for grocery shopping and teach herself piano until they returned. Only when she expressed an interest in high school musical theater did her parents suspect something. “What?” they asked. “But you don’t even like music.”
“Actually,” she answered, “I kind of do.”
She was a junior at the University of Pittsburgh before she’d even heard of music therapy. A pre-med student, she volunteered at a local cancer center. She wanted to connect with patients in a deeper way, so she started bringing her guitar — the yellowish, textbook acoustic guitar her parents got her for her 16th birthday, still the only one she’s ever had. Someone heard her play and asked if she was a music therapist.
“A what?” she answered.
A music therapist, this person explained, uses music to lift spirits and alleviate suffering. They visit hospitals, schools, addiction centers, nursing homes and many other places, using music to help their clients. The specific goal, Maggie explains, varies from client to client and even session to session. A good music therapist is nothing if not adaptable.
With her internship indefinitely postponed, she draws on that flexibility. She emails 46 other music therapy practices, hoping one might have a slot despite COVID-19. In the meantime, she becomes her own therapist. From her parents’ deck, overlooking rolling grasses and blooming wildflowers, she plays for fun. “When the weather’s nice, you can just sit out there and listen to the birds and play your guitar,” she says. “It was the perfect getaway.”
There’s always music in her head anyway. “My mind is just a radio that never turns off,” she says. She’s tried to turn to books instead, but music is soothing in its own way.
In early April, after legendary soul musician Bill Withers died, she went next door, to her grandparents’ house, and played the comforting chords of his classic “Lean on Me” in their driveway — 10 feet away from them, of course, sitting in a wooden kitchen chair just outside the red-brick facade around the garage door. For at least a few minutes, they were lost in Maggie’s soothing voice, listening to her sing about how there’s always tomorrow.
It took a pile of tomorrows, but emails eventually start flooding her inbox. Forty-five music therapy practices can’t help her. But one, in South Bend, Indiana, begins its email with, “Hi Maggie, you are in luck.”