Miracle Moments with Brian Muni, OTD ’22
This article was originally published in the Spring 2023 edition of the Chatham Recorder Alumni Magazine by Cara Gillotti. To view more digital Recorder stories, click here.
Brian Muni, Doctor of Occupational Therapy ’22, was seven when the Beatles came to America and appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. “We had just gotten a color television set; my neighbor said, ‘Those kids will electrocute themselves!’; and I was hooked. I’ve been playing music ever since,” he says. “And it’s really been the focus of my life.”
Today, Muni uses his passion for music to help his clients, as an occupational therapist in the New York Public School System. But first, there was Allen Ginsberg.
Muni had been attending Brown University, studying English and American literature, when he spent the summer before his junior year at Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO. There, he worked on songwriting with legendary Beat Generation poets including Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs.
“Allen Ginsberg was quite a character,” recalls Muni. “He was a brilliant student of poetry, and he took care of a lot of his community. There were a lot of parties. He would write haikus on paper plates, spontaneously compose them with a fountain pen, and just give it to you. I still have one that he gave to me.” Muni also transcribed music for Ginsberg, some of which have been published in Ginsberg’s books.
That gap year also took him to Bogota, Colombia, where he became fluent in Spanish. “After I came back,” Muni says, “it was hard for me to graduate because I felt like I had seen a lot of the world.”
New York City beckons
Still, graduate he did, and then moved to New York City, where he spent the next 12 years creating and playing music, including soundtracks for performance artists. “New York City in the 80s was a very interesting place if you could afford to live and work in Manhattan,” he says. “It was a very dynamic time.”
Muni formed a band called Big Game that was heavily influenced by African and Latin music. “I was singing and playing a five-string violin,” Muni says. “It was kind of like an art-rock band.” Big Game toured Europe, spending a month in Spain, where they “definitely received more attention than we were probably worthy of,” he laughs, “but we were treated beautifully, and it was fun.”
During this time, occupational therapy (OT) was not on his radar, though his father had a cardiac condition, and he himself was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of 25. “I was in that world,” he says. “I had done all this holistic training, all kinds of different diets, different types of bodywork. I’ve been doing transcendental meditation since I was 15 so I had that mind/wellness mentality, but I had never heard of OT.”
Discovering OT
Then one day, in his early 30s, having finished a long-term temp assignment, Muni was going through the want ads in the New York Times. “There was an ad for occupational therapists, at $65/hour for the New York City Department of Education. And I was like ‘Wow, what is an occupational therapist?’ And so I called up the employment agency to ask, and I was like ‘Oh, I can do that!’ But you need a degree. So I looked into it. I went to visit hospitals and clinics, and thought ‘All right, let’s do it!’”
Muni moved back home to live with his mother and her husband to get started with the prerequisite classes, which he describes as a fantastic experience. “I was also very fortunate because at that time, IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) had just been implemented, so there was all this money out there to get people to become OTs. In exchange for their paying for me to go to NYU, I gave them a year of service for each year of tuition. I went to work for the DOE (Department of Education), and that was 30 years ago.”
Muni began to look into earning his doctorate, partially in order to put data and research into the use of music in OT. “I went to a New York State OT Association conference and asked every OTD I met what they thought about their programs. One person was so enthusiastic about Chatham’s post-professional online OTD program, so I explored it further. Chatham had the quality, it had the timeframe, and it had the cost-benefit, and I thought ‘This is good!’ I reached out, they agreed to interview me, and the next day said I could be a member of the class.”
“My capstone project was on the effect of music with children with special needs to increase engagement in classroom activities,” says Muni. Music was defined as the listening, singing, moving to, writing, and making of music. Those five areas aligned well with the components of occupational performance that early occupational therapists identified: sensory, motor, cognitive, emotional, and social. His research showed very strong evidence of clinical and statistical significance. “That was a happy, though not surprising, outcome,” he says.
The power of music
“Music is so powerful because there’s no single brain center for it. It lights up the whole thing. And that’s why I’ve been a crusader for the use of music in OT despite administrators not necessarily understanding it. My doctorate has helped sort of lessen those concerns.”
So how is music used in OT? In a variety of ways, says Muni. “Let’s talk about the Hokey Pokey. What does it teach? It teaches your right from your left. Hands, feet, forward, backwards, in, out, and you’re doing it all together.” Or the opportunity to play music—say, strumming a guitar—can be used as a reward for completing a task. “The trick is to use a guitar tuned to an open G chord,” explains Muni. “They strum it, and it’s already a beautiful thing.”
“This one fourth grade class I worked with during my research project was so exuberant, so we wrote a song together which was called ‘I Gotta Be Me’. This was five children without vision, moving and singing and spewing out feelings, and one of them sang ‘I love to see the light, the light is so beautiful’ and she made all these visual references. There are just so many of these moments; it’s so powerful.”
Currently, Muni works in an elementary school in the Bronx. “These are children with individualized education programs (IEP),” he says. “The focus for the most part is on fine motor abilities, handwriting, and self-regulation, which promotes attention, and the ability to take in new learning.” He’s also working with the school choir and would like to get them on a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade float singing a Thanksgiving song he wrote with a class of third-graders a couple of years ago.
To say it’s been a rewarding career would be an understatement. “One of my early amazing moments was working with a group of children with multiple handicaps, jamming with them and their aides. Getting their assistants to put percussion into their splints or drumsticks, so they could hit a drum, shake a shaker, vocalize and sing along, and do it together in a circle—are you kidding me? Is that a miracle moment?”
Want to learn more about Occupational Therapy at ChathamU? We offer an online Post-Professional Occupational Therapy (PPOTD) doctoral program and an entry-level Occupational Therapy program (ELOTD), including an integrated undergraduate and ELOTD program.
To hear some of the songs Muni uses with his OT clients, visit brianmuni.com/occupational-therapy.