In Memoriam

Jeremie Tucker, MTA

March 15, 1947 (Stamford, CT) – October 31, 2024

 Long-time Certified MTA and valued community member, Jeremie Tucker, died October 31. Jeremie was a beloved member of the first-ever music therapy class in 1976 when Capilano College first started its Diploma in Music Therapy. She obtained her Bachelor of Music Therapy in 1996. Jeremie was a contributor to the music therapy profession in many ways over the years. 

She worked at several sites and was the half-time music therapist at Shaughnessy Veteran’s hospital until 1993.  She became the first full-time unionized music therapist at Queen’s Park Care Centre. She worked at the long-term care centre, developing music therapy in their day health and hospice programs. She supervised more than 40 practicum and internship students during her career. Jeremie said, “the students were pure gold, each so different and adding so much to the work”.

In 2005, Jeremie published her book, Multidimensional music therapy, which is still available. She was a board member of the  BC chapter (pre MTABC) and was awarded with a life membership from MTABC in 2009. 

Jeremie had a fond love of music and found joy sharing that music with others through her extremely creative clinical work. Jeremie retired from her exciting 40-year career only because of severe arthritis.

Nancy Grace McMaster,

MA, MTA, FAMI 

Aug 27th, 1946 – December 12, 2023

“Scholar, practitioner, researcher, author,

mentor, friend, Professor Emeritus”

Our global music therapy community experienced a deep loss when Nancy McMaster died. Nancy was diagnosed with terminal cancer in April 2023, which she embraced courageously as she embarked on her final spiritual, reflective journey. She passed away peacefully in the early evening with loved ones nearby. 

Nancy dedicated her full self to music therapy, with her intelligence, creativity, and profound awareness of the field of music therapy internationally. In particular, she shared her plentiful gifts with the music therapy community at Capilano College/University in North Vancouver, B.C. where she co-founded the first Canadian music therapy program with Carolyn Kenny in 1976. Here she mentored and inspired students through her passion for her beloved profession, teaching for forty-five years until her retirement in 2022. 

Nancy’s music therapy education was eclectic: Nordoff-Robbins diploma in 1974, Guided Imagery and Music, and graduate studies in Music Psychotherapy at NYU in 1996. She worked with children, teens, and adults in private practice for nearly 50 years and continued performing and recording for many years.

Nancy said that her family deeply appreciated music. Her earliest memories were that the world was a profoundly musical place, the rhythm of dripping taps and the complex layered sounds of construction sites. As a school child, she easily learned simple piano pieces graduating to classical piano in her teens. Classical piano voiced what she struggled to articulate verbally. Nancy played many solo concerts as she grew her relationship with music. 

Nancy’s family cared about social activism. Her mother was trained in social work and her father was a conscientious objector and lawyer for Vancouverite Japanese Canadians systematically interned during the Second World War by the Canadian government. 

Nancy’s perceptions were part of the ethos of the 60s. She said that her life changed forever when she picked up a hitchhiker in Vancouver and first heard the words music and therapy linked; she heard a click of recognition in her head. The hitchhiker invited her to join some people who had come together to provide music therapy services to youth in Vancouver. This work, funded by the Canadian government, was called the Children’s Spontaneous Music Workshops, and emerged directly out of the social revolution of the ’60s, which included awareness of altered states of consciousness, music, the value of culture, and disenchantment with conventions of power and inequality: Children’s Spontaneous Workshops. (link https://vimeo.com/36274609) The group worked in two teams at different sites and gathered weekly for a day of community building, shared stories and meals, and improvising. Carolyn Kenny was also part of this group. Nancy said that the bond she and Carolyn built through this shared experience was the foundation of their later collaborative partnership. To hear Nancy tell this story, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URyH2jjhBcc

 Nancy travelled to India to participate in six months of meditation which she said forever altered her view of the nature and potentials of human beings. On her way back to Vancouver, she stopped in London to study piano with Edith Vogel at the Guildhall School of Music. While there, she heard about the Nordoff-Robbins course starting up at the Goldie Leigh Hospital where she became part of the first music therapy cohort. 

Nancy was part of several important music therapy symposia: the Herdecke symposium on music therapy training organized by Johannes Eschen, the subsequent music therapy symposium in Heidelberg, and several international symposia with graduates of Nordoff-Robbins training programs. She was an invited presenter in several countries including Japan, Germany, USA, and Canada and a published author in several international books about music therapy and several music therapy journals.

Nancy played a significant pioneering role in the Canadian Association of Music Therapists (CAMT) as a board member of several of the first CAMT boards that articulated the foundations of the profession of music therapy in Canada. She also was a board member of the Music Therapy Association of British Columbia for many years. 

Nancy shared her terminal life trajectory with her broader music therapy community at the World Congress of Music Therapy 2023 in Vancouver. She lovingly hugged many and received their expressions of deep gratitude, grief, and love, while also expressing her creative joy in a workshop on piano improvisation. That was Nancy living her full life. You can find the first six minutes at this YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5s1pvyiTTA 

Nancy shared poetry during her last months through Caring Bridge with her community about practising and her beloved piano. Click to read the poems (hyperlink poem here), see the photo and hear Nancy playing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm1o10RNLhc

Click here to see Nancy’s celebration of life that was held on February 10, 2024 (hyperlink) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlV2fF_KEX0

On June 6, 2024, Nancy was honoured posthumously by Capilano University with the designation Professor Emeritus status. This designation shows respect for her distinguished career and ongoing contribution.

Nancy was deeply intuitive, listened profoundly, laughed uproariously, and believed in the power of music to heal. She said that what matters now is what has always mattered: human qualities like love, beauty, creativity, courage, honesty, play, joy, discovery, mastery and spiritual well-being. 

Nancy is deeply missed.

A bursary has been set up in her name the Nancy McMaster Memorial Bursary to support a music therapy student at Capilano University. Please visit this website to donate:  hyperlink https://www.capilanou.ca/about-capu/connect-with-capu/give-to-capu/

– By Sue Baines, PhD, MTA, FAMI

Nancy’s poetry (2023)

Piano #2: Why DO we spend so much time practicing?

by Nancy

What’s it FOR,
this working on pieces of music
hour after hour after hour?

It’s for me –
for being washed through
with great floods of color
and being tickled by moments of mastery;
for summoning and stretching
my commitment, my focus, my gifts;
for speaking my depths;

It’s for giving –
for filling the very air with blessing,
with moments of infinite tenderness,
power, protest, determination, balance,
lightness, joy, grace, clarity, simplicity;

It’s for all of us –
for our awe of form and beauty,
for the gift of listening with heart, body,
mind and spirit.

It is like touching Heaven
as if it were a taut cloth, wet,
causing it to “bleed through”,
bringing Heaven to Earth for a while

Untitled

by Nancy 

This music is playing me
as much as I am playing it.
Only through me (or ONE of us)
can it find expression –
and only through IT
can I find expression –

There are definitely two “beings” here,
somehow –
It’s like kissing, or making love,
very slowly and whole-heartedly,
shaping the moment jointly,
not interested in boundaries
or in keeping separate –

As long as I allow it,
the music and I overlap,
intermingling so totally
that we are One –

It feels WONDERFUL!

(SO why don’t I do it more OFTEN?!)