Re: A Brisbane Community Dinkum Experience
About Brynjulf Stige
Biography
PhD, Professor in Music Therapy, University of Bergen, and Head of Research in GAMUT, The Grieg Academy Music Therapy Research Centre. Stige has published on topics such as music therapy improvisation, music education, culture-centered music therapy, and community music therapy. He has published four books in Norwegian and three books in English. The latter are: Culture-Centered Music Therapy (2002), Contemporary Voices in Music Therapy (2002, edited with Carolyn Kenny), and Elaborations toward a Notion of Community Music Therapy (2003). Stige is Norwegian editor of Nordic Journal of Music Therapy and co-editor (with Carolyn Kenny) of Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy.
.or environmental music therapy, or music milieu therapy, or Social Music Therapy, or . Community Music Therapy?
A Response to Ruth Bright
I appreciate very much Ruth Bright's thoughts on my column "A Brisbane Community Dinkum Experience." With reference to a statement by Descartes ("I will not argue with you unless you define your terms.") she argues that: "When we speak of our work in the community, the definition of terms is fraught with difficulty and we need to decide before we have any major discussion what we mean by Community Music Therapy." Some possible meanings are implied already in the title of her comment ("Community Music Therapy," community music therapy, or music therapy in the community?).
To some degree I agree with the request for definition, and in a recent text I spent more than 400 pages in an attempt to define Community Music Therapy (Stige, 2003). I hope this helps me if I should meet anyone with a Cartesian attitude... At the same time I think definitions in this case also run the risk of hindering communication instead of improving it. While music therapy models, which have originators, sometimes may be defined relatively clearly, this is not necessarily the case with Community Music Therapy. I do not think it is something that anybody made up; it is rather an evolving area of practice, that is, it is a diverse "family" of approaches and practices that grow out certain needs and possibilities in modern and late modern culture. If I - or any other music therapist interested in this area - start all conversations about this with an exact definition, we run the risk of disagreeing about specific trees instead of sharing a view of the forest, if you understand what I mean. Most probably we would encounter reactions such as "Hey! I've been doing this for the last 20 years, how dare you come here and define it in a way that I don't exactly agree with?"
If Community Music Therapy is no model and has no originators, why then not write "community music therapy"? Well, my expectation is that in the future this is how it will be written by many; if/when the term is more established. My own reason for using the spelling Community Music Therapy has been linked to the fact that it is a relatively new notion (even though the practice is not new!). For comparison, consider the following note from the fifth edition of APA's Publication Manual: "Dictionaries are not a good guide to the rapidly proliferating vocabulary of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The 10th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, for example, lists E-mail as the preferred spelling, but the term is now so common that it is usually spelled e-mail or even email." (American Psychological Association, 2001, p. 89). In my own writings I have used a similar logic, and therefore have operated with the seemingly inconsistent spellings "Community Music Therapy" and "music therapy." I explore Community Music Therapy as a relatively new notion and discuss it in relation to the broader and more established term music therapy.
Why then not simply speak about music therapy in the community? I think the term "music therapy in the community" is perfectly legitimate in many cases, but it does not necessarily cover what some (including me) seem to mean by Community Music Therapy. With Community Music Therapy we do not only refer to community as a context to work in, but also as a context to work with. In other words; the community may at times achieve the status as (co)client. Through use of some notions that I developed in an earlier publication (Stige, 2002), I argue that Community Music Therapy may be characterized as a value based practice with agendas expanded (the inclusion of a focus upon communal change), arenas unlocked (more open and inclusive settings), agents involved in new ways (participatory processes), and activities and artifacts applied with a broader range of functions (music as an ecology of performed relationships) (Stige, 2003, pp. 450-451). This way of working has a long history in music therapy. Possibly it is the oldest form of music therapy that ever existed. Terms such as "expanded" and "unlocked" are used, then, in relation only to some specific conventions that have become common in modern, individual therapy.
Ruth Bright closes her thoughts with some comments about my comments on the Australian terms "mateship" and "dinkum," and she states that "these words are not in common use today." I want to thank her for stating this, because it helped me to reflect upon the possibility that I have written the column in a way that could be perceived differently from what I intended. I started my column by describing a night when I was rambling around in Brisbane city, taking photographs of banyan tress, eating kangaroo meat, and drinking pink billabong. In this way I did not try to say: "This is Australia." Rather, I was trying to say something in the direction of "I'm a tourist, and I know it, hope I don't blow it." In Brisbane I was of course also a tourist in relation to Australian music therapy. From literature searches in various databases and from discussions with friends and colleagues, I already knew that Australia has a strong and long tradition for music therapy in the community. I assume that Ruth Bright's pioneering efforts have been part of what brought this about. What surprised me at the Australian conference, then, was not that I heard several interesting papers about this. The surprising thing was that so many chose to label their work Community Music Therapy (or community music therapy). I think it is striking that the term has established itself so strongly in such a short time.
My interpretation of this is that it reflects a long felt need among many music therapists of finding a term that could "coordinate" the discussion of practices that could be distinguished from say medical music therapy or music psychotherapy. Probably not everybody would agree, and I hope to be able to discuss this with you and others in Brisbane in 2005.
References
American Psychological Association (2001). Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (Fifth Edition). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Stige, Brynjulf (2002). Culture-Centered Music Therapy. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers.
Stige, Brynjulf (2003). Elaborations toward a Notion of Community Music Therapy. Oslo: Unpublished Dissertation for the Degree of Dr. art, Faculty of Arts, Department of Music and Theatre, University of Oslo