Dan Wenger
Founder & Owner of PBMT
Music Psychotherapist
Training
Licensed Creative Arts Therapist (NYS) | Board-Certified Music Therapist
Master of Science (Music Therapy), SUNY New Paltz | Analytical Music Therapy Trainee
After completing his clinical training at the Nordoff-Robbins Institute at NYU, Dan earned his board certification as a music therapist before earning his creative arts therapy license in New York State.
Dan's experience includes providing music therapy services in complex pediatric palliative care, nursing facilities, hospice care, special education, outpatient clinical, and in-home settings. Through the program at Molloy College, Dan is currently training as an Analytical Music Therapist (AMT). AMT is a model of music psychotherapy that guides experiential and insight-oriented processes primarily through the use of titled improvisation and verbal processing.
He was chosen to participate in the 2023 Creative Community Fellowship by National Art Strategies for his efforts towards increasing music and creative arts therapy programming in Midcoast Maine. He’s regularly invited to share his work in various circles, including support groups, PechaKucha events, healthcare organization meetings, and on media platforms such as NPR’s Maine Calling.
Therapeutic Approach
Through an integrative music therapy process drawing on psychodynamic and humanistic principles, Dan facilitates a process that meets clients according to strengths, challenges, patterns, and preferences.
Dan empowers clients with music-centered experiences to help them express and experience themselves based on their unique context. The four music experiences clients share with Dan are: re-creative, improvisational, listening, or compositional.
Together, Dan and his clients focus their musicking on ideas, stories, symbols, or feelings that are relevant or emerging to client. This may support music for enactment (e.g. re-experiencing of an idea, story, image, or feeling) or as material for verbal processing and deeper insight. Dan may also offer psychoeducation, encourage imaging with music, or guide rhythmic breathing experiences. Clients may also listen to and analyze recordings, recreate songs, and compose original music during their music therapy process.
Dan provides a warm, reliable, and open-minded presence that encourages clients to express freely with his unique creativity and support.
Extramusical Activities
Dan moved to the Midcoast in 2022 with his partner and dog, Ella. Since relocating, Ella has learned to eat lowbush blueberries.
When he's not reading by a fire or practicing a melody he can't get out of his head, you may find Dan hiking trails, cold dipping, snowboarding, or playing music with friends.
My Philosophy
Sound plays an emotional role in human growth and development. For each of us there is the need for quiet time to rest blissfully, baby’s heartwarming cooing and responsive motherese, baby’s wails for help, listening actively to the voice of another, learning to respond to different expressions of our name, and the first time we hear a stern no, to name a few universal melodies.
We may perceive music or begin musicking — active engagement with sound — at any moment. In practice, the artist can consider Cage’s 4’33” or Duchamp’s Fountain while the literalist can listen as the heart makes meaningful beats and each breath holds a discernible frequency, or pitch, influenced by internal factors. When we seek to understand what music means to us, we are exploring one’s inner life or learning the ways they perceive and define the world.
As infants, our interactions with music — whether through lullabies, rhythms, or other musical qualities of speech (prosody) — help form our early understanding of communication and emotional expression. Our understanding of musical concepts, capacity for musicking, and our expressive range develops depending on our experiences. The music we hold onto teaches us about ourselves and influences how we navigate the world and our relationships.
The primary obstacles to healthful or meaningful musicking are always emotional.
