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

Much Ado About Nothing?

To my surprise the little piece "The 'Jambo' Means 'Hello' in Africa Syndrome" (published as the Voices Fortnightly Column of September 23 - October 7, 2002) brought about three comments in just a few days. I want to apologize for my delay in writing a response (but I'll not wear out the readers with explaining the reasons for this delay).

I want to thank Kristen M. Cole, Jane Edwards, and Carlos Suarez for their commentaries. Most of what they write I resonate with, if not in every detail. The clearest disagreement seems to be with Jane Edwards, concerning the value of the term "community music therapy." In this response I will therefore concentrate on her "Shakespearean piece," even though what she comments upon is not the main errand of my text. My piece was not about community music therapy. I focused upon the need for cultural sensitivity in music therapy, and only used community music therapy as one possible example of an area of practice where this issue is of very high relevance.

Be that as it may, Edward's concerns about this emerging term are important to deal with. The issues she raises are complex and, to my judgment, of high significance for the discipline and profession. I have tried to deal with similar issues in a few recent texts. In order not to make this response too long I will refer to these texts (where more elaborated arguments are presented), and I hope therefore that the readers will forgive the somewhat frequent references to my own work.

In her commentary Edwards writes:

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 [it] is a 'brand,' or 'agenda' as Stige 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) (Edwards, 2002).

Let me first say that to my mind community music therapy is not another name for being sensitized to culture. In the introduction to the recent book Contemporary Voices in Music Therapy, Carolyn Kenny and I have discussed what we call the "turn to culture" in contemporary music therapy. There is an increasing interest for and awareness about cultural issues in the discipline and profession, and Edwards' own work is probably a good example of this. The implications for music therapy may at least be seen at three levels, which in the above-mentioned text is outlined as follows (Stige & Kenny, 2002, p. 27-28):

1) New areas of practice: Cultural perspectives invite practitioners to explore new areas of practice, by focusing upon the client-in-context. The most established term for this in the literature is Bruscia's (1998) ecological music therapy, while recently the term community music therapy has emerged as a term used by more and more scholars and practitioners.

2) New principles of practice (in new or established areas of music therapy): Culture-specific perspectives become increasingly relevant and important as a large number of music therapists now work in multicultural settings, and they represent important ethical and clinical challenges.

3) New theoretical and metatheoretical perspectives: The turn to culture also implies that culture-centered theories will be developed. An example of an integrative and culture-inclusive theory is Kenny's Field of Play (1989, 1996). Kenny suggests that we must consider all conditions in the environment when designing our theories and practices in music therapy. Culture-centered music therapy represents a quest for new metatheoretical ideas in the field of music therapy, and may inform and challenge some established conceptions (Stige, 2002a).

In my column "The 'Jambo' Means 'Hello' in Africa Syndrome" what I was discussing was at the level of point 2 above (the importance of cultural sensitivity in any area of clinical practice), but I used community music therapy (at the level of point 1 above) as an example when discussing this.

Jane Edwards has more to say about the notion of community music therapy, however:

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. ... 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 (Edwards, 2002).

To this I want to say that I very well understand that in Edwards' university center, where she is working in a department that also trains community musicians, a term such as community music therapy could create confusion, at least in the beginning. The (Irish/British) term of community music is institutionalized in a way that, to my knowledge, has no parallel in any other countries. But, since community music therapy is emerging as an international term, I think that it could be problematic to have it "banned" because of specific Irish/British language problems. In a literature review of German, Norwegian, and North American music therapy literature (supplemented by British texts), I suggest that community music therapy is not (only) a mixture of community music and music therapy, but that at least five (growing and changing) roots are visible: 1) community healing rituals of traditional cultures, 2) practices of conventional modern music therapy, 3) traditions and activities of community music, 4) models of sociotherapy and milieu therapy, 5) approaches to community work (Stige, 2002b).

The last issue I will try to deal with in this response is the conclusion of Edwards' comment:

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. ... Let's keep the name and let's be proud of the name of our work (Edwards, 2002).

Keep the name of what? Of the discipline, the profession(als), and/or the practical work? As I have discussed in Chapter 7 of Culture-Centered Music Therapy, these are conceptual levels in defining music therapy that often are confused:

...the label of music therapy is not "natural." It was chosen in a specific historical context of clinical practice with a concept of therapy strongly informed by medical perspectives, or at least addressed to communicate in medical contexts. Today the label has a touch of reductionist anachronism to it. Later developments of both theory and practice suggest that health rather than therapy is the shared focus. ... This change in focus contributes to the problem of defining music therapy. To this must be added the confusion created when distinctions are not made between definitions of discipline, profession, and practice. Disagreements on definitions may in some cases be based in insufficient distinctions between these conceptual levels. In some other fields this distinction may be more obvious in everyday discourse, because different words are in use for each level. Compare for instance the differences in language between the two following descriptions; a music therapist is doing music therapy after having studied music therapy, while a physician may be doing surgery after having studied medicine. In the latter case three different words distinguish profession, practice, and discipline, while in the first case these three levels are all related to the same term.

If there was no history and we could start all over, I would propose we chose new terms in order to clarify these conceptual levels. We could choose a term different from "music therapy" for the discipline (for instance health musicology) and then two other terms for practice and profession. In the present situation of established use of the term music therapy, this probably only would create confusion. Instead I propose that continuous reflection upon the conceptual distinctions between music therapy as discipline, profession, and practice is precious for the development of the field (Stige, 2002b, pp. 191-192).

I am not saying that Edwards' conception of music therapy is confused. I am only saying that her critique of the term community music therapy to my judgment does not clarify the distinctions between discipline, profession, and practice. I have not advocated community music therapy as name for neither discipline nor profession. What I suggest is that the practice of music therapy is so broad that several areas of practice need to be developed, and that community music therapy is emerging as one such area. The need for definition and discussion of areas of practice is no new or radical suggestion. The most important contributions to this discussion are the areas of practice as outlined by Bruscia (1989, 1998).

"Music therapy by any other name would smell as sweet" is the title of Edwards' commentary. I assume she is paraphrasing Shakespeare's famous line in Romeo and Juliet. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet? I must confess that I never knew what that should mean. Are names and phenomena that separate? I grew up in a small town of western Norway, called the "Town of Roses." The name, first suggested by the poet and writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in the beginning of the twentieth century, gave little meaning in the middle of the century, when the town was bombed to pieces and all you could smell was smoke. After the war the town was rebuilt in the architecture of the 1950s, as boring and sterile as boring and sterile can be. Gone were all the small wooden houses with their sweet rose gardens. The local politicians did want to give up the "pet name" of the town, however, and built a few parks with thousands of public roses in them. The name "Town of Roses" seemed to have a sweet smell of its own. As a boy I always found this forced sweetness somewhat amusing. You could take your boat and row out to any of the islands of the fjord and smell flowers as sweet or even sweeter than any rose, but these were tiny and less well-known flowers. No politician would care to use any of them when trying to put the town on the map. Names seem to matter as much as sweetness, or rather; the narratives to which names belong are not completely separated from our perception of phenomena.

References

Bruscia, Kenneth (1989). Defining Music Therapy. Spring City, PA: Spring House Books.

Bruscia, Kenneth (1998). Defining Music Therapy, second edition. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers.

Edwards, Jane (2002). "Music Therapy by any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet" or "Community Music Therapy" Means "Culturally Sensitive Music Therapy" in Our Language. [online] Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. Retrieved December 14, 2002, fromhttp://voices.no/?q=content/context-and-culture#comment-620

Kenny, Carolyn B. (1989). The Field of Play. A Guide for the Theory and Practice of Music Therapy. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company.

Kenny, Carolyn B. (1996). Cultural Influences on Music Therapy Education, In: David Aldridge. Papers for the Eighth World Congress for Music Therapy, Hamburg, Germany, CD-ROM, Universität Witten/Herdecke, Germany.

Stige, Brynjulf (2002a). Culture-Centered Music Therapy. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers.

Stige, Brynjulf (2002b). The Relentless Roots of Community Music Therapy [online] Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy. Retrieved December 14, 2002, from http://www.voices.no/mainissues/Voices2(3)Stige.html

Stige, Brynjulf & Carolyn Kenny (2002). Introduction - The Turn to Culture. In: Kenny, Carolyn & Brynjulf Stige (eds.). Contemporary Voices in Music Therapy. Oslo: Unipub.