Re: Context and Culture
About Jane Edwards
Biography
PhD is an Associate Professor in the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and has been the course director for their MA in Music Therapy programme since 1999. She is a qualified music therapist with clinical experience in providing music therapy for children who are ill in hospital. She is a Guest Professor at the Institute for Music Therapy at the University of the Arts in Berlin, Germany. She is widely published in the field of music therapy with many peer reviewed papers and chapters in a number of well received edited books such as Barbara Wheeler’s Music therapy research, 2nd edition, and Susan Hadley’s Feminist perspectives in music therapy for example. Her edited book Music: Promoting health and creating community in healthcare contexts with contributions from authors in six countries was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2007. Currently she is on a sabbatical break; editing a book about music therapy in parent-infant programmes, and trying to finish reading Naomi Klein’s horrifying tome The shock doctrine (Penguin, 2007).
"Music Therapy by any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet" or "Community Music Therapy" Means "Culturally Sensitive Music Therapy" in Our Language
Reading Stige's article I was troubled by the reference to community music therapy as if this is a way of practicing that is a type of music therapy. My sense of what has started to be referred to as 'community music therapy' is that is a 'brand', or 'agenda' as Sige calls it, that has been inappropriately placed on some practices of music therapy for some reason known to people who keep using this term. If community music therapy means that we are sensitised to culture and context then I can't help observing that this new 'community music therapy' that we are to understand is going to become increasingly 'crucial' in the years to come according to Stige, seems to be rather like the 'music therapy' I have observed in many places and have taught for a decade (and practiced for longer). Stige is right though, teaching cultural awareness is not about learning a few words or about gross generalisations, it is about many dimensions of openness to others' experience. It is helping students and practitioners to achieve a greater understanding, and also to reflect on, their own experience of 'otherness' with reference to etic and emic perspectives.
I am not sure I see the need for suggesting that there will be a new wave of practice that will need to be branded as 'community music therapy'. I have supervised many practitioners who seem appropriately sensitised to cultural and contextual issues including the context of the family system of the patient without calling their work community music therapy. I have been to many case presentations and conference papers where music therapists from different countries seem perfectly able to respect and be sensitive to the context-bound and culturally-laden aspects of their perceptions and ways of knowing about a patient or a community group as well as their promotion of certain ways of working within communities.
I have worked with many patients and groups from non-English speaking backgrounds and I have worked with many English-speaking people who do not have Western European backgrounds. I have worked with community groups as a music therapist while seeing my work as distinct from community music and I have worked with families while seeing my work as intrinsically and entirely within the remit of the music therapy practitioner. However, I don't want to call my work or my teaching 'community music therapy' and I don't want others to think of my work that way.
As I have indicated elsewhere, I teach in a university centre that offers a one year full-time Master of Arts in Community Music. This brings me into regular contact with community musicians and community music educators and researchers. A community music practitioner in my region came past my office door the other day and we started to chat. He is troubled by the lack of identity among community musicians and the inability of others as well as the practitioners themselves to find a working definition of what they do. We began a very interesting dialogue. One of the ideas we explored in terms of identity was that community music can happen whether or not a community practitioner is present however music therapy as been defined by us as over time as an interaction which includes a music therapist, music and client or client group. In addition we discussed that it may not be imperative that the project be lead by a community musician in order to receive funding as community music. Community music is distinct and unfamiliar in every situation and the practitioner in a way reinvents the practice of community music every time they run a programme. At the same time 'community music' can have a stand-alone identity or be a brand applied retrospectively to experiences and community events with music at their centre. That is part of the nature of the work. I just cannot see the direct similarity in music therapy. I have to express my reluctance at the mix of these two approaches to working musically with people; while my respect and interest in community music continues unabated.
In conclusion, I take issue with the idea that there is a phenomenon such as 'community music therapy' that we are supposed to embrace and understand. We are qualified as 'music therapists', not 'community music therapists'. All music therapy work by its nature involves interaction with a community, therefore cultural and contextual awareness and sensitivity is required of us. This practice that we do is called music therapy and almost all parts of the world that offer training call it this. Perhaps it is a kind of 'hello' that can be recognized across the world even when it is practiced so differently in different countries. Let's keep the name and let's be proud of the name of our work.