Voices ResourcesA website for the worldwide community around the journal Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy

An Oslo Community Dinkum Experience
Response to Katrina McFerrin-Skewes: "A Brisbane Community Dinkum Experience"

It was nice to read Katrina's column a few weeks ago, and to learn that she felt "a wave of relief" when she first read about Community Music Therapy. From talking about this to many music therapists in different countries and contexts over the last 18 months, I recognize Katrina's reactions as quite characteristic (though she puts her thoughts with an appealing honesty and clarity in her column). It's characteristic that her first response is: "But does it need a title? We've been doing this for years!" If I got money for every time someone said that to me I'd be a rich man now! And of course it's true to an extent. But the interesting thing is what Katrina goes on to say:
I also find it useful. It has encouraged me to communicate about my work in a way that I was hesitant to do previously, simply because I can reference a shared concept of community music therapy. It has provided me with a vocabulary with which to discuss this community based work, whether I agree with all the tenets proposed under the concept of Culture Centered Music Therapy (Stige 2002) or not. And I was one of the many who made reference to it at the recent conference in beautiful Brisbane, because it felt good to do so.
I like that last comment - "because it felt good to do so". So why did it feel good - why does it feel good for the many others who've told me something rather similar? I think the answer is rather simple: because (to mix my images hopelessly) the concept 'community music therapy' raises a flag for the whole of what many music therapists do, or would like to do; it also sketches a conceptual map to help them think about this; and it provides a large golfing umbrella for music therapists of very different backgrounds to stand under and talk about it all. Rachel Verney suggested the last of these images when she said that community music therapy simply allowed music therapists to talk about everything they do, not just what they feel (from their training) they should do (ie 'proper therapy' as legitimated by the Consensus Model). Because the fact is that when you talk to music therapists they often use music in a variety of ways within their hospital, school or social setting - they enjoy being musicians as well as therapists in the service of the life of their circumstantial communities, and they enjoy finding creative links between private and public, between psychological and social aspects of their work. But they often only talk openly about only the 'approved' practices - leaving the other aspects unconfessed, unexplored and undervalued.
Brynjulf Stige says much of this in a more developed way in his recently completed doctoral thesis Elaborations toward a Notion of Community Music Therapy (Faculty of Arts, University of Oslo, 2003) - to my knowledge the first doctoral level piece of scholarship on the history, philosophy and practice of Community Music Therapy. As you would expect of Brynjulf's work, here is a 500-page study that gives an elaborate and subtle argument for why we suddenly seem to have arrived at Community Music Therapy's moment within the ever-changing story of modern music therapy. His thinking in this thesis bears a strong family likeness to the arguments in his recent highly-acclaimed book Culture Centered Music Therapy (Stige 2002). But it also goes further in showing how Community Music Therapy is the logical practice of music therapy for which Culture Centred Music Therapy is the theory and metatheory. After reading Stige's thesis I think nobody could think 'Community Music Therapy' an opportunistic political move to re-brand music therapy - to give a 'new name for an old game'. Rather Stige makes a convincing case for believing just the opposite of this - that Community Music Therapy is a new game for a new age:
What already seems clear is that the emergence of Community Music Therapy fuels a process that stimulates reflections about the identity of music therapists, as well as the prospects of music therapy in late modern societies [.] Community Music Therapy therefore has the prospect of facilitating the modernization of modern music therapy: it may be part of a process where implications of cultural changes in late modernity interact with developments of the discipline and profession of music therapy. (Stige 2003, p. 464)
Whilst I don't want to oversimplify Stige's subtle arguments, one of his points that I think will be influential for music therapists is that a 'modernisation' of music therapy will involve broader roles (as well as broader arenas) for music therapists, along with a broadening of theory to accompany this. Doing 'therapy' as currently defined and understood by many music therapists will likely be only be one of the possible music/therapeutic roles and activities . Stige suggests 'health musicking' as a broader encompassing category, with music therapists re-defining their territory as an interface between so-called 'clinical practices' and the everyday musical practices which people use for identity and community building.
In this sense, Community Music Therapy is a conceptual flag being waived in promotion of what many music therapists already do, or could do, or would like to do. As Stige writes in the current Editorial to VOICES (vol. 3, no. 3) our discipline's question is moving from 'What is music therapy?' to the far more interesting 'What could music therapy be?'. Clearly the flag is catching people's eye and acting as a rallying-point. The Oxford and Brisbane conference clearly had it in mind, as perhaps does the forthcoming Canadian conference. A few publications are around the corner. Community Music Therapy does seem to be the talk of the town at the moment. This itself is interesting.
Last weekend I had the privilege of being at an Oslo Community Music Therapy Dinkum. (of a sort!) - in the shape of Brynjulf's defence of his thesis. In the formal surrounding of a lecture theatre in one of the old Oslo University buildings we heard his elaborations on the thesis during the disputation session. The evening before Brynjulf gave his 'trial lecture' on the subject of the 'pleasure' in music therapy. As he pointed out it's (incredibly) an almost uncharted area in the literature, or usual debate in the discipline. It seems that problems always trump pleasures for music therapists. These various events showed me how the concept of Community Music Therapy could function as a site for some rather comprehensive re-thinking of the practices, theories and metatheoretical foundations of music therapy - as a vehicle for asking 'What could music therapy be?'
Which is of course not to say that everyone needs to follow this particular flag; talk the same language; stand under the same umbrella; mean exactly the same thing. Just that there is perhaps a new umbrella to stand under; that the emerging vocabulary might be useful to many - that a new conversation may feel good to have.
Mercedes Pavlicevic and I have just edited a book for Jessica Kingsley Publishers, called Community Music Therapy (in press). Many diverse music therapists, from many parts of the world, found it comfortable and interesting to stand under our umbrella for a while: to agree and disagree; put forward similar and dissimilar ideas; describe varied practices with a family resemblance. All seemed to find the concept of Community Music Therapy useful in some way - to work with, against or alongside. The main metaphor that came out of all the chapters we've called the "ripple effect". Community Music Therapy is like a pebble dropped into the music therapy pond - creating concentric ripples in a perhaps rather too-calm surface. The ripple-effect also describes the central fact most writers on Community Music Therapy want to convey: that music radiates naturally; that it involves people and spreads out, but also includes within; that it works within and amongst the nested domains of socio-cultural life.
I had a surprise (if somewhat tangential) conversation the other day with a usually very withdrawn and taciturn patient - on "string theory". We'd both seen the same television documentary on this imaginative attempt by physicists to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics. It seemingly goes back to the good old Pythagorean metaphor of the cosmic symphony, which led my patient to comment, "our music's really cosmic after all". It all made me think of how on the television programme all the experts had agreed and disagreed, had thought this rather speculative theory either the answer to everything, or, alternatively, rather daft. But interestingly, even (especially?) the experts who found it daft seemed to be drawn to talking about it. It was useful, that is, as a heuristic if nothing else. Any parallels here with Community Music Therapy?

References
Pavlicevic. M. & Ansdell, G. (Ed.)(in press) Community Music Therapy. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Stige, B. (2002) Culture-Centered Music Therapy. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers.
Stige, B. (2003) 'Elaborations towards a Notion of Community Music Therapy'. Unpublished Phd thesis. Faculty of Arts, University of Oslo.